Mosquito bites make us itch, make us sick and can carry the Zika virus.
The virus is linked to thousands of birth defects in Brazil and has led the World Health Organisation to declare an international public health emergency.
So can the Zika virus-carrying mosquito be controlled?
As Kerry Skyring reports, scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Austria think they have the answer -- nuke the male mosquito.
At the Seibersdorf laboratories near Vienna, scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency are getting intimately acquainted with the sex life of the mosquito.
They are breeding them then sterilising the males through nuclear radiation, ready for release into the wild.
When females mate with these sterile males there will be no baby mossies.
It feels a bit like a North Queensland holiday in this lab - hot and steamy.
Entomologist Jeremie Gilles points proudly to a cage of black bugs.
"Of course we target the males because we can't release females. This is very important because female mosquitoes are a nuisance but they also transmit the diseases so we absolutely need to release only males."
It's called SIT, Sterile Insect Technology, and is used successfully against the deadly Tsetse Fly in Africa.
The hope is that countries like Brazil - where the mosquito-borne Zika virus is linked to thousands of birth defects - will quickly adopt the technology.
Kostas Bourtzis heads the IAEA's Pest Control Laboratory and says early trials are promising.
"A successful trial in Italy was one of the first ones and as we speak there are trials in China and in Mauritius and in Indonesia and more are planning for later this year in Singapore, in Thailand and in Brazil."
Another hot and steamy room, another sex scene.
The scientists need to know whether a sterilised male mosquito is as attractive to the opposite sex as a fertile one.
"You take the wild male, you take the laboratory-reared sterilised male and you put them in competition for a wild female. And you see who is the best. Ok. And this is way to test the quality of your product, of the sterile males."
According to the World Health Organisation the Zika virus is "spreading explosively" and could infect as many as 4 million people in the Americas.
Reducing these infections is enough justification for sterilising male mosquitoes.
But research entomologist Andrew Parker points out another reason.
"If we can reach local eradication, not global eradication, but local removal of the pest species then of course there's no longer any need to use the pesticides. So the technology lends itself very much to a substantial reduction in the use of pesticides."
But Brazil is a huge country and in August it will host the Olympic Games.
Could enough sterile male mosquitoes be released in time to make a difference?
The IAEA's Aldo Malavasi says they could.
"If Brazil released a huge number of sterile males take a few months to reduce the population. But again, has to be combined with the other methods. We don't have what is called the silver bullet. SIT is very good at reducing the population in combination with other methods."
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