I've been thinking a lot about mosquitoes lately.

Partly because of all the headlines about the Zika virus, but also because there's a new proposal out there that some pretty eminent scientists are taking very seriously.

A proposal to wipe mosquitoes off the face of the earth.

To just kill them all for good.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

It's to the best of our knowledge,

and we're talking about a bioengineered mass mosquito side.

And not just because of Zika,

but because of malaria, dengue, yellow fever.

I mean, every year, hundreds of thousands of people die from mosquito-borne diseases.

When you add it up, more people have died from mosquitoes than from war. But still, deliberately

kill off a species? Charles Monroe Kane called writer Dan Engberg to check it out.

So first thing, okay, let's assume, just for sake of argument, that we're going to do this, that we're going to destroy all mosquitoes in the world.

How many lives do you guess that would save in a year?

So, you know, malaria kills, I checked the WHO stats, and they say 600,000 people a year, mostly children.

The other mosquito-borne illnesses are less deadly but significant. So, I mean, I think we can

say reasonably at least 6 million, maybe 8 million per decade.

Let's also talk financially here for a second, though.

We spend a lot of money dealing with mosquitoes in this world, with diseases and with sprays and insecticides and larvae. Do you have any idea of how much money we would save if we killed all the mosquitoes?

Yeah. You know, there was a study done of the financial impact of dengue fever in Brazil.

So we're just talking about one disease here.

We're not even talking about malaria.

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