The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: SVPete on June 10, 2026, 03:13:12 PM
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Oh Good, Screwworms Are Back
https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/oh-good-screwworms-are-back (https://www.marginallycompelling.com/p/oh-good-screwworms-are-back)
Unlike most flies that lay eggs in dead and rotting organic matter, the Newworld Screwworm lays eggs in the open wounds and mucus membranes of living animals. The maggots then eat the animal (or human!) alive. Its scientific name is cochleomyia hominivorax which literally means “man-eating snail”.
These little monsters have plagued livestock and humans in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas for centuries. This includes the southern US, the Caribbean, and most of Central and South America. The devastation of these terrible creatures amounted to billions of dollars of yearly damage on top of the fact that they are extremely gross and cause massive human and animal suffering.
So why am I not already familiar with this thing? I’ve lived most of my life in a region of the US that is the historic breeding ground for the screwworm, why have I not heard anything about it?
That’s because, similar to the eradication of small pox, we used science and massive international institutional coordination to destroy this nasty little pest.
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In the 1930’s, Raymond Bushland and Edward Knipling were studying the screwworm in Texas where it was devastating livestock herds. These two scientists proposed and developing the “sterile insect technique” (SIT), which involves breeding the insects, sterilizing them with radiation, and releasing them into the wild. Because the female screwworm fly mates only once, if she mates with a sterile male fly any eggs she lays will not produce maggots.
This has the immediate benefit of stopping the maggots from killing livestock but also has the long term benefit of eradicating these little assholes. Of course this would mean intentionally breeding sterile flies on an industrial scale and releasing millions of them into the wild. So that is what they decided to do.
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Over the next 30-40 years, the there was a major push for screwworm eradication in North America. It was driven out of the US in the 60’s. With enormous international cooperation, they were pushed out of Mexico and Belize in the 80’s and eradication was pushed down to Panama by the 1990’s.
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It wasn’t plausible to push screwworm elimination past Panama for a number of reasons that include political instability and the fact that Brazil is an enormous and terrifying place.
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Apparently in 2022, the screwworm barrier was breached. I say “apparently” because there seems to be wide agreement that 2022 is when this happened but no one can point to an event or any form of data about when this happened. The year 2022 seems to be a backward extrapolation from the fact that in 2023 there were 6,500 screwworm cases in Panama. Since then, cases have spread up through Central America and into Mexico.
How did this happen? That’s an interesting and mysterious story. The official line is that there were supply chain disruptions associated with the Covid pandemic that limited the Panama production of sterile flies necessary for screwworm containment.
I’m skeptical that this is a complete explanation because it sounds a lot like a faultless excuse. No one can blame anyone for Covid supply chain disruptions. No one gets fired for Covid supply chain disruptions.
It seems very likely that unchecked northward migration of livestock herds in 2022-2023 was a big factor in this ongoing disaster. Expert entomologists have looked at the pattern with exasperation and concluded that this is really the only plausible explanation since the flies themselves simply do not spread that quickly on their own. They were almost certainly transported via unchecked northward migration of people and animals.
The article doesn't "go there", but I will Guess who in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 facilitated and encouraged uncontrolled "northward migration of people and animals".
Further, this problem could be reversed within a couple of years, but there are potential obstacles: bureaucratic laziness; obstruction by Dem Trump-Haters; obstruction by Enviros; "Screw the Yankees" Mexico (with Hate-Trump salsa) and Nicaragua (and other Central American countries?); drug runners and human traffickers.