A tech-and-public-health story: Google's plan to wipe out disease-spreading mosquitoes is good news for people in mosquito-heavy areas, but it still needs regulator approval.

• Mosquitoes are the world's deadliest animal, and the chemical fog trucks used to fight them have stopped working because the bugs evolved resistance.
• Google's Verily division breeds male mosquitoes (which don't bite) carrying a natural bacterium called Wolbachia that makes females lay eggs that never hatch, collapsing the population.
• Machines sort millions of mosquitoes by sex using face-recognition-style cameras, doing in hours what once took human workers a week.
• A Fresno, California trial cut biting females by over 95%, and the method has worked in Singapore and Australia too.
• As of June 2026 Google is still waiting on EPA approval; the plan is 16 million released in Florida the first year, then 16 million in California.

Outlook: If regulators sign off, the releases start across the two states in 2026, with bigger projects likely to follow — though hot, poorer tropical countries where the disease is worst will be much harder to reach.