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Google Aims to Debug California and Florida by Releasing 64 Million Mosquitoes

An earlier project already led to a 95 percent drop in biting females of one disease-carrying species in Fresno.

Ronald Bailey | 6.4.2026 2:45 PM

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The Debug Project at Google (parent company Alphabet) aims to drastically reduce the populations of mosquitoes in California and Florida. Hooray! Debug is seeking an experimental use permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release 64 million lab-grown male mosquitoes (they don't bite) that are infected with the Wolbachia bacteria over two years. The infected males breed with wild (biting and disease-carrying) females who later lay eggs that do not hatch. The result: a mosquito population crash resulting in far less risk of people acquiring mosquito-borne illnesses.

Spreading lab-grown, Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes as a way to drastically reduce the populations of disease-carrying mosquitoes has been done successfully for many years all over the world. The result has been steep reductions in mosquito-borne illnesses in place like Northern Australia, Singapore, and Brazil.

The technique has also been successfully deployed in various places in the United States. In fact, Google's Debug worked with the........

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