By Sharnie Kim

A CSIRO experiment has managed to wipe out more than 80 per cent of a dengue fever-spreading mosquito near a far north Queensland town.

The CSIRO released more than three million sterile male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in small towns near Innisfail last summer, and the females they mated with laid sterile eggs.

The researchers drove around the towns in van that used GPS sensors to release mosquitoes at certain intervals to get even coverage of the male mosquitoes across the area.

CSIRO research director Paul De Barro said the team partnered with James Cook University and tech company Verily for the "Debug Innisfail" project.

"We created a population of mosquitoes that had within them a naturally occurring bacterium called wolbachia," he said.

"What we were doing is releasing only males that had this wolbachia, and they would cross with mosquitoes in the field, the wild mosquitoes that didn't have that same strain of wolbachia, and as a result the wild females would only lay sterile eggs and so the population would crash."

The Aedes aegypti mosquito also spreads diseases such as yellow fever, zika virus and chikungunya, making hundreds of millions of people sick in more than 120 countries each year.

Dr De Barro said the results of the experiment were promising for efforts to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes from urban areas.

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