A car trundles along a bumpy village road in the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. As it passes through the lush tropical landscape, a woman in the backseat reaches into a box full of sealed plastic tubes. She opens them one-by-one and methodically shakes the contents out through an open window. She is releasing a batch of laboratory-bred mosquitoes that have been modified by scientists to eliminate the scourge of dengue fever. Regular releases like this by field workers and volunteers are producing dramatic trial results in selected communities in Asia Pacific and South America. Now researchers are turning to digital technologies to scale up their fight worldwide. Around 40 percent of the world’s population – about 3 billion people in 100 countries – live in communities with a risk of dengue and other potentially deadly mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya.

Many of those people struggle with poverty and overcrowding, and tragically the most vulnerable to these diseases are often the very young.

“The haunting memory of dengue is the body ache,” recalls Evisake Wainiqolo, a Fijian mother of seven, who was infected as a child. “The pain is beyond explanation.”

There are no cures. But what if something could curb the power of mosquitoes to infect people?

Well, there is. It’s a bacteria called Wolbachia. And, in a way, it is to mosquitoes what kryptonite is to Superman. That’s because Wolbachia limits the replication of dengue and those other viruses within a mosquito’s body.

Using techniques developed by scientists at Monash University in Australia, the World Mosquito Program breeds mosquitoes with Wolbachia-infused cells and releases them into the environment to mate with local mosquitoes. This interbreeding spreads Wolbachia across entire mosquito populations and neutralizes their disease-carrying capabilities.