Verily, a branch of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc, has been working on plans to eliminate mosquito-borne diseases around the world by breeding thousands of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

The idea is to breed lots of these male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, infect them with a common bacterium called Wolbachia, load them into a van and release them into the wild. Male mosquitoes don't bite humans as all adult mosquitoes feed on the nectar or honey dew of plants but the females need protein which they get from blood to produce eggs. These Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes would mate with their counterpart females in the wild, which contract Wolbachia and lay eggs. But the offspring never hatch.

It is still unclear what would happen if mosquitoes were wiped off as the ecological role that mosquitoes play hasn’t been thoroughly studied, though some scientists suggest we might be just fine without them.

This method has been proven effective because in 2016, scientists at a company called MosquitoMate discovered how to infect mosquitoes with a particular kind of Wolbachia that makes mosquito eggs futile. The result of this strategy has been a 95 percent reduction in the mosquito population in targeted areas for 2018, according to the results of the second six-month study conducted by Verily, MosquitoMate and county departments.

If Alphabet can intensify its mosquito-eradicating technology, governments and companies in South America and Africa, where the species and malaria is widespread, might be willing to pay to eliminate mosquitoes from their environment.

"The key part is trying to be able to do a program like this in a very affordable and efficient way," Jacob Crawford, a Verily scientist, told Bloomberg. "So that we can go to places where there isn't a lot of money."