by Donald Wood
Last updated: 12:45 PM ET, Tue July 10, 2018
Researchers in Australia recently conducted an experiment that wiped out around 80 percent of mosquitoes that carry diseases such as dengue fever, yellow fever, zika virus and chikungunya.
According to ABC.net, the research conducted by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) saw the group release more than three million sterile male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes near the Queensland town of Innisfail.
The mosquitoes were released last summer with a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia, causing any female insects that mated with them to lay sterile eggs. As a result, the population of disease-carrying mosquitoes has started to drop.
"We created a population of mosquitoes that had within them a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia," CSIRO research director Paul De Barro told ABC.net.
"What we were doing is releasing only males that had this wolbachia, and they would cross with mosquitoes in the field, the wild mosquitoes that didn't have that same strain of wolbachia, and as a result the wild females would only lay sterile eggs and so the population would crash," De Barro continued.
The "Debug Innisfail" project was conducted by CSIRO, James Cook University and tech company Verily with the long-term intent of eliminating disease-carrying mosquitoes from urban areas around the world.
In a similar experiment, the World Mosquito Program conducted by Monash University reduced locally transmitted dengue cases in Cairns by also releasing wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in north Queensland.
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