You're listening to the BBC World Service. This is Michael Blasland with the inquiry.

This week, why don't we eradicate mosquitoes?

One night last summer, the sound unmistakable.

I lay in my hotel room looking, waiting, hating.

Then, on my arm, there, and almost instinctively...

There's little risk of malaria, dengue or zika in my room.

The same experience in Brazil, when a mosquito bit myelin Ferreira and disease crept into her blood has been blamed for her son David's birth this year with microcephaly.

One of three in the hospital that day, one of thousands in Brazil in the past year,

prompting the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency.

If we could have that mosquito too, good surely. In fact, what if we could somehow scale up the remedy across the continent?

The world. Does any species have it coming to it quite like this one?

Hence our question, why don't we eradicate mosquitoes?

Part 1, the Mosquito Hunter.

I think that there is a touch of magic to realize that these creatures are much more than

dots that fly and transmit either disease or just irritation.

Our first expert witness is Tovey Lehman.

He's one of a team in Mali that has been studying mosquitoes for years. If we know enough about them, maybe we can learn

to control them. Do we?

It is quite mind sobering to realize that a number of totally fundamental questions, for example how do

mosquitoes persist in dry areas without surface water, has been debated over the years with no resolution.

That's almost ABC for natural history of organisms.

You'd think, for example, we would at least know where they live,

...