How do you fight a swarm of disease carrying mosquitoes? By breeding an uninfected swarm of your own.

While the idea may sound counterintuitive, that’s exactly what scientists are doing to help fight Dengue fever, the deadly mosquito-spread epidemic that has plagued much of the Pearl River Delta.

Guangdong has taken a number of different approaches in the fight against Dengue fever over the years: patriotic campaigns, removing abandoned cars, and mass fumigation. However, the fever has continued to spread and infected over 47,000 residents in the PRD last year.

With the high season of Dengue now upon us, authorities are going on the offensive to ensure there won’t be a repeat of last year’s “full-blown crisis“.

Scientists from Sun Yat-sen University are fighting against mosquito-spread Dengue fever by releasing sterilized male mosquitoes of their own, in hopes of eventually eliminating the female mosquitoes carrying Dengue.

To do so however, they need to be breed a lot of mosquitos. The Science City is breeding a million male sterilized mosquitoes every week and releasing them on the city’s Shazai Island in Nansha District, making the mosquito factory the largest in the world.

According to team leader Xi Zhiyong, they’re confident that their hard work will pay off:

We need to be very thorough and precise with our scientific data. Our objective is to have our findings published in the world’s top scientific periodicals and exert international influence in the fight against Dengue fever.

There is currently no known cure or vaccine for Dengue fever, which kills upwards of 22,000 people each year. With high season for Dengue fever upon us, here’s hoping Xi’s method is successful.