Concerns over screwworm ramped up this fall after the parasite was detected in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. One was detected approximately 70 miles from the Texas border in September and a second was detected about 170 miles from the border in October.
USDA officials told state lawmakers on Tuesday that within 400 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, they’ve detected 14 cases, but all of them were related to cattle movement. None of the cases suggested the fly population itself was moving farther north.
Efforts to eradicate the screwworm are underway in Panama, where USDA officials are helping produce 100 million sterile flies per week meant to mate with the screwworm in hopes of eradicating their population.
Wah. Infrastructure costs money. Boo hoo.
If you’d bothered to eradicate the screwworm before it got to this point, you wouldn’t be having this problem.
The US for years kept the screwworm from spreading back into Panama by maintaining a virtual wall of sterile flies across the Darién Gap, which was a cheap way to protect all of North America.
But then stupid MAGA politics came along, put idiots in charge, and they decided that they’d rather try to protect the Mexico-US border and not give Mexico and Panama the incidental benefit, rather than protecting a smaller border that happened to help other countries. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-nasty-parasite-now-it-could-be-coming-back/ar-AA1DKRSV has some information about how it became a problem again.
That would have meant sending money to countries south of the border far sooner (foreign aid! boo! hiss!!!) and investing in bluesky R&D to identify and prevent pests before they become an industry-shaking crisis (science is a scam! NIH has never done anything useful! just pray harder idiot atheists!).
I guess, on the upside, a massive outbreak north of the Rio Grande would mean a sharp drop off in agricultural carbon and methane emissions.
I just wish it wasn’t via such a monstrously painful mechanism.
Nice Kurtzgesagt video about this:
