France, April 11 -- Mosquito populations have fallen by around 40 percent in targeted areas within a year, after researchers released sterilised male mosquitoes that mate with females whose eggs never hatch.

The method was developed by researchers from CIRAD, a French agricultural research centre, and IRD, a French research institute, which have been working on mosquito control on the island for years.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of these tiger mosquitoes are bred at the IRD insectarium, put to sleep and sent to CIRAD laboratories, where they are sterilised using X-rays.

"There are a lot of them - 193,000 Aedes albopictus, or tiger mosquitoes," Mathieu Whiteside, a medical biology technician at IRD, told RFI.

Once...