Google Wants to Start a “Mosquito Civil War”

Google has a plan to fight mosquito-borne diseases, and it involves releasing 32 million more of them. It is all part of Google’s “Debug project”.

The tech giant is seeking U.S. government approval to release millions of sterile mosquitoes across Florida and California over two years in a bid to “reduce” mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever, which are specifically transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The logic, according to the tech giant, is that Google’s “good” mosquitoes are male, carrying a naturally occurring bacteria called Wolbachia that makes them unable to reproduce with wild female mosquitoes. Males also cannot bite, so they are completely harmless to humans. The idea is simple: flood the population with sterile males, collapse the breeding cycle, and cut disease transmission.

The project has already been tested in Singapore and rolled out in the British Virgin Islands. Florida and California, CBS News reports, could be next.