More than three thousand million people live with the risk of malaria. Due to the widespread resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of parasites to chemotherapies, previous gains made in disease reduction are being reversed. In addition to this perennial threat, there is now a rapid invasion of Aedes mosquitoes across the globe and the associated spread of the arboviruses (arthropod-borne viruses) they carry. One half of the world's population is now at risk of dengue, and chikungunya (having emerged from Africa) is an increasing public-health problem in Asia and the Americas. The economic and social costs of these diseases is so great that, in some areas, they have slowed the development of nations. Current vector-control methods are inadequate (especially against container-breeding species) because they are losing their effectiveness, the global burden of mosquito-borne diseases is increasing, and no specific drugs or effective global vaccines are available to treat or prevent the diseases. Therefore, there is a need for additional suppression methods to be applied as part of Integrated Vector Management (IVM). Since the early 2000s, there has been a renewed interest in applying the sterile insect technique (SIT) against mosquito vectors of disease. The explosive outbreaks of the Zika virus (and associated birth defects) across the tropics increased the urgency. The recent availability of technology to rear and release the sterilized males of many mosquito species on a large scale has increased the expectation that the SIT could help reduce the suffering caused by mosquitoborne diseases. Much progress has been made in developing the SIT technology for mosquitoes, based on historic SIT efforts and the experiences gained in the successful large-scale application of the technique against agricultural pest species. The SIT is a suitable technology for suppressing mosquitoes because: (1) they can be mass-reared in a laboratory, (2) natural sexual dimorphism in ma