Markets
Inside the French factory breeding 1.5 million sterile mosquitoes a week
In two years a Montpellier firm, Terratis, has scaled from nothing to 1.5 million sterile male tiger mosquitoes a week, with a target of 40 million. The technique works, the head of the IRD in Montpellier calls it 'iPhone 1.0 stage', but no French city can yet afford to cover itself, and four in five tiger mosquitoes still hatch in private gardens. The factory and the household point to the same answer.
Read →Insect Écran's 50% DEET spray ranks in France's 2026 pharmacy survey, and what it says to shoppers
Insect Écran's 50% DEET *Zones Infestées* spray was among the products ranked in the insect-repellent category of the 2026 'Meilleur Produit Pharma' consumer survey. The result is a useful signpost for how French pharmacy shoppers are choosing their repellents, and where that diverges from advice elsewhere in Europe, where icaridin at 20% has been the first-line pharmacy recommendation for the past decade.
Read →Picaridin and IR3535 are quietly retiring DEET from the repellent aisle
For seventy years, choosing a mosquito repellent meant choosing how much DEET you could tolerate. In 2026 the buying guides have quietly changed the question: the first names on the shelf are picaridin and IR3535, two ingredients most Europeans cannot pronounce and increasingly cannot avoid. The shift is real, the science mostly supports it, and it conceals one limitation that applies to every bottle in the aisle.
Read →Mosquito control is a $10 billion market, not the $38 billion going viral
A figure is circulating this summer: the global mosquito-control market racing toward $37.95 billion by 2033 at more than 15% a year. It has one weakness, nobody can say where it came from. The clearest peer-reviewed figure covers only the repellent segment, at $3.2 billion. The more useful story is not the size but the shift: the serious innovation is in surveillance, not the consumer aisle.
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