Reprinted with permission from World at Large

In Ghana, Kenya, Japan, Poland and probably other countries as well, it’s now the mosquitos who fear the sound of buzzing—from drones built to detect and destroy them.

Economies of scale and widespread adoption has reduced the price of drones by around 20% since 2018, putting them under the cost of malaria medication and mosquito-proof bed nets, said one Kenyan malaria policy advisory.

Mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile virus kill around 700,000 people every year, and it was recently estimated that 60 billion Homo sapiens have been killed by these diseases since we first evolved—an estimation of half of all the human beings to ever live.

The vast majority of these deaths will have occurred in the tropics

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