Mosquitoes can be extremely dangerous. Each year mosquitoes infect about 700 with various diseases such as Malaria and Zika. Millions of people die from mosquitoes a year. There have been many attempts by the government and non profit organizations to solve this problem, but none of them have succeeded. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has an interesting method of getting rid of the mosquito problem.
The USAID’s approach to getting rid of the problem of disease spreading via mosquitoes is to breed mosquitoes in captivity, and expose them to radiation that makes them sterile. They will breed them in large quantities, and then put them across the United States, and they will out number the ones with disease.
In 2016 the USAID funded WeRobotics. They are engineering a drone that can deploy sterile mosquitoes from autonomous drones. WeRobotics was originally started to explore positive social affects that drones can have. Their most recent project is a prototype drone that will carry sleeping mosquitoes so that it can drop them. The mosquitoes are asleep because they are fragile, and they need to pack as many mosquitoes as they can. If they weren’t asleep, they could possibly hurt each other.
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