This idea came up after a research done by Australian researchers concluding that old mosquitoes are more deadly and dangerous as they are efficient agents to spread out diseases. So they thought to find out a way so that these can die at an early young age naturally.

Previously efforts had been made to make mosquitoes resistant to diseases like malaria and dengue. These two diseases have caused massive number of deaths around the world in the past few years. A mosquito takes almost two weeks to make it a deadly weapon to spread disease.

One type of fruit fly gets infected with bacterial parasite and dies early. Scientists used the fruit-fly parasite to infect Ades Aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue. As a result of this experiment, the mosquitoes born infected mothers died within 21 days. Whereas their normal life span is 50 days (reported in University of Queensland’s journal ‘Science’ by biologist O’Neill)

O’Neill says, it “may provide an inexpensive approach to dengue control”, if the experiment is successful and the mosquitoes die sooner in open. Positive results are hoped. Andrew Read and Matthew Thomas, specialists at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in an article “By killing old mosquitoes, wMelPop could thus impact on dengue transmission”. This editorial accompanied the work which they called ‘a major step’.

Further research work is looked forward in the next month by O’Neill and his team.