Why is it "used to be"? I've heard about the program before and thought it was incredible. What happened to it?
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
Funding was recently cut but this infestation has been building for years. The key failure that caused this current outbreak was during COVID. The lockdowns shut down both the release flights by the US and the mosquito breeding facilities in Latina America, grinding the whole pest control program to a halt.
Already happening. Beef is rapidly becomming unaffordable. A steak at the supermarket is >$20. Can't imagine what they cost at a restaurant. I've switched to mostly turkey, chicken, and pork.
That's due to issues around monopolization in the Dairy and Cattle industry in the US. 70% of all processors in the dairy and cattle industry are now owned by 3 companies. Processors don't own cattle - they just process raw material like dairy and meat into cheese and pasteurized milk and handle the entire supply chain. But because they control the supply chain, distribution, and even the feed [0] used they can set rates and vendors used.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
Is this supported by the data? During the pandemic people were also blaming "monopolization" or "consolidation" for the rise in grocery prices, but in reality the margins of publicly traded supermarket companies went up by a percentage point or two.
Yep. To quote The Bullvine [0] (Axios for the cattle and dairy industry):
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
> Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
The border didn't magically eradicate the flies on one side. Pushing the border down to the Darien Gap took work, but we did it before and can do it again. The real problem is the gleeful destruction of government capacity to do things like this.
You get that there was a president between 2020 and now, right? Nobody is sticking up for Trump; they're just saying, this particular bad thing isn't a DOGE outcome.
The first sign of spread past panama was seen in Nov 2024. Parasites can spread fast and the US/Mexico needed to react fast to the fact that it spread past panama.
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
And the Panama border (Darien Gap, specifically) used to be a stronger natural barrier; humans have been crossing it for years, are starting to graze cows within the exclusion zone, etc.
Musk certainly shares responsibility, but focusing responsibility on him lets others escape blame - eg Trump, Congress, the corpo and individual edgelord enablers sanguine about chaos, etc.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, and he still ends up being used as a useful idiot by a con artist. "But Trump said he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
I have no idea. It certainly seems insanely careless to me to defund something like this but I haven't found anything in my brief research that gives me an idea of the impact. Intuitively I'd expect that to show up in the data a little later (assuming that data is still being collected)
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
The key to managing this pest [edit: after it breaches the isthmus program] is through active monitoring, treating infested wounds as well as conducting castration and dehorning in less active months. It’s not like cattle herds didn’t exist prior to the 1950s.
That’s how we manage them now. I mean before we had that program, we dealt with the pest/infestation that way and we can in the future too if need be to combat what’s getting through. Obviously neutralizing them down in the isthmus is preferred but we’re seeing them come up from Mexico now. So if you have a minor infestation that’s how you treat it to address whatever gets missed by the sterilization program.
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to pest.
Whether your meat comes form South America or the US or the EU, always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face. There are thousands of types of dangerous larvae that can infect via the eyes rubbing the eyes or the nose picking ones nose when handling raw meats and vegetables. Cutting meat slices thinner and cooking them well kills larvae. Marinating meats with something that contains acetic acid also helps. Stomach acid takes care of the rest.
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
The US successfully eradicated screwworms here in 1966 with a brilliant integrated sterile insect technique - I think the very first use of it (and had previously funded helping other countries control it also). But if we had another outbreak spread, I doubt there's any shred of competence left in this current gutted federal government to do anything like that again. Maybe they can have the new ICE folks try to deport the screwworm flies.
USAID was in charge of the program which monitored screwworm spread in central and south america. The way you combat screwworm is by releasing sterile male flies in screwworm outbreak areas.
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
I appreciate you citing the USAID funding but you seem to be trying to prove a point rather than get to the truth. Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown, USDA is actively working on it, one can see this by going to usda.gov and searching for "screwworm". I really appreciate ajmurmann's edit which acknowledges this.
Coming from a family that has cattle and dairy cows in south eastern Brazil, where screwworm is endemic, I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US. After some research it appears it affects more climates that are always hot and humid, and big operations where the animals are not being checked frequently. Also the handling at the 60s was probably much worse than modern techniques for avoiding animals being hurt and treating when they are infected.
Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
Yes, the USDA-APHIS Screwworm Barrier Maintenance Program had its funding reduced by 30% in the 2024 budget, which significantly impacted sterile fly production capacity at the Panama facility.
> This is maintained with stringent animal movement controls, surveillance, trapping, and following the proven science to push the NWS barrier south in phases as quickly as possible.
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
(Implied) invalid generalization, or confirmation bias. This is a good reason to not eat that particular meat. In general, however, meat is an S-tier source of nutrition, vitamins, and minerals.
What a weird question, if it was at all genuine. Not only is it not inefficient but, e.g., cows are absolutely unique and amazing for their ability to digest, e.g., grass into something that is highly nutritiously desirable for humans.
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
All predators evolved to capture the energy and nutrients of other organisms. That's just nature.
So many animal kingdom predatory deaths are absolutely macabre. Orcas and dolphins play with their food, some hymenoptera lay eggs inside live prey, big cats eat the young and elderly, crocks drown and dismember victims, mantids decapitate their partners.
The cookie cutter shark takes large chunks of flesh and leaves the prey alive, so maybe that's more ethical?
Then there are parasites! They tend to keep their host alive unless they're like toxo and need their host to get eaten to complete the reproductive cycle. For instance, some louse eat the tongues of their victims and feast on their food intake. It doesn't kill the host.
Are we saying nature is wrong? That the only life should be plants?
Plants kill each other all the time! They squeeze, choke, infect, grow tall and capture all of the sun...
Evolution is brutal. Every species exists to out-compete.
edit: I'm not going to respond to each individual reply calling me a fascist or relating eating to rape or slavery. Those kind of hyperbolic arguments won't win me over.
Lovely platitudes but "nature" stops being abstract once it is happening to you, we are talking about mammals being eaten alive here, so that could be you, your family, your pets, cattle...etc. Of course people are going to react to that.
Of course rape is natural. Orangutans, ducks, geese, and certain dolphin species also rape. That's a problem if you think "natural" justifies human behavior, but why would it?
Loving the super salty replies to this relying on appeals to nature, whataboutism, and entirely missing the point. This wasn't even that snarky of a comment.
As a non-meat eater I've gotten used to how riled up and defensive people get over the mere suggestion that eating meat in today's industrialized society comes at an ecological and economic cost that we can't afford in the long run. I find much better luck engaging people by suggesting reduced consumption of meat vs. total abstinence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/3sD9d
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
[0] - https://www.landolakesinc.com/what-we-do/animal-nutrition/
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/dairys-great-cons...
We can also live in a cave, better for the environment.
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...
But it can and does infect humans and other animals
https://kbhbradio.com/usda-cuts-budget-staff-for-animal-dise...
Part of it was restored a couple of months later.
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
The cost to fight this back will definitely exponentially increase.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, and he still ends up being used as a useful idiot by a con artist. "But Trump said he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to pest.
To clarify: it was never eradicated. It’s been actively managed and kept at bay. Now it’s punching through some holes.
What assholes. :(
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
Food safety with raw meets isn’t really going against the agenda.
Everything I'm reading says it has been funded by USDA, and in fact funding has been significantly increased during 2025.
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
It’s not a huge problem in the US. We eradicated screwworm in the 60s.
We are trying very hard to keep it out. The US normally works very hard to monitor and prevent these situations in trade partners.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flesh-eating-scre...
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
USDA approved an emergency funding of 165 million in 2024 for this issue
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/agency-announcements/usda-ap...
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
What you say is maybe true but irrelevant. We don't have to grow grass.
Yep. I hear that.
<saturday-soap-box>
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
</saturday-soap-box>
So many animal kingdom predatory deaths are absolutely macabre. Orcas and dolphins play with their food, some hymenoptera lay eggs inside live prey, big cats eat the young and elderly, crocks drown and dismember victims, mantids decapitate their partners.
The cookie cutter shark takes large chunks of flesh and leaves the prey alive, so maybe that's more ethical?
Then there are parasites! They tend to keep their host alive unless they're like toxo and need their host to get eaten to complete the reproductive cycle. For instance, some louse eat the tongues of their victims and feast on their food intake. It doesn't kill the host.
Are we saying nature is wrong? That the only life should be plants?
Plants kill each other all the time! They squeeze, choke, infect, grow tall and capture all of the sun...
Evolution is brutal. Every species exists to out-compete.
edit: I'm not going to respond to each individual reply calling me a fascist or relating eating to rape or slavery. Those kind of hyperbolic arguments won't win me over.
Or it’s only natural when a non-human species is killed off by another species?
You should not reply to any of them, but just flag them, honestly.
At some point mankind added moral.
And I wrote „just nature“ because parent used it’s nature as a justification. Hence the moral part.