folks please caption your pictures. which one of these is the new world screwworm ?
Well it’s pretty simple, one of these pictures shows a horrible disgusting blood-sucking parasite, and the other is a new world screwworm.
I’d love to blame this entirely on DOGE and trump but honestly this was a perfect storm that built up over decades.
The screwworm was eradicated from the US a long time ago using sterile fly releases that pushed the population progressively southward until the Darién Gap became the permanent chokepoint. They maintained the barrier there with sterile fly releases and ground monitoring and it worked. It worked so well that the Mission, Texas facility closed in 1981 and the Mexico facility closed in 1999 because there was no longer a need for them.
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded. Then COVID wrecked the monitoring infrastructure. Ground teams couldn’t operate, sterile fly releases got disrupted, and the barrier at the Gap was breached. The flies started moving north again and the program didn’t have the capacity it once did to respond.
DOGE cuts to USDA APHIS in 2025 hit an already compromised program at the worst possible time reduced staffing and funding when they needed to be scaling up emergency sterile fly production and reestablishing the barrier.
So yes, the current administration made it worse. The vulnerability was already there before those cuts, and once COVID broke the barrier there was always a real chance they were going to make it back to the US regardless.
Fuck DOGE and trump though for real, I just cant get on this “its entirely their fault” train.
That old lady was standing near the edge of the cliff. The fence was already broken. I pushed her off the edge. You can’t say it’s entirely my fault.
And to be fair, I was wantonly shoving a whole bunch of people, and lots of them didn’t die. The ones who did had some preexisting vulnerability, so not my fault.
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded.
This part is sort of glossed over. There was a report in 2018 that the Panama facility was in dire need of updates. We were talking about a one time $50M investment and an extra $10-15M a year to hold screwworms at the Darien Gap as they had been for decades. Trump did nothing. It’s easy to blame COVID, but there is a very, very avoidable problem and yes, the blame lies squarely with Trump.
I dunno, this just seems like the entire narrative that government ran things are bad. I mean sure everything was crumbling when Trump started actively breaking things with Doge. But the reason they were crumbling before that was Republican policy and Covid was absolutely Trump’s fault from dismantling the programs that monitored pandemics.
Any government run system needs something to trim the bloat down. Otherwise there is nothing to stop it becoming dangerous. Capitalism relies on profit motives to do this. It works, to an extent.
The problem comes with how to trim. E.g. this programme. Once the barrier was established, it could be trimmed. The fact it worked for 25 years after is proof of this. This (in theory) would free up resources for more critical tasks. The catch is that it needed to hard protect the barrier itself. It also needed the capability to rapidly scale back up. It seems that that was trimmed too, leading to the current crisis.
A dam is a good analogy. It takes a lot of resources to build one. But far less to run and maintain it. You also need the option for emergency maintenance, but that can be shared with other dams or construction projects, when not needed.
The first trim got rid of the construction budget. DOGE got rid of the maintenance budget. Now the dam needs rebuilding, not just maintaining.
Thank you for the context. Highly appreciated! I had gathered the gradual decline in funding and surveillance from this publication but they didn’t really talk about the damages done by COVID or DOGE.
so this is another thing that can be traced back to Reagan? lol
Nuanced perspective with historical context is so good. Thank you for sharing it. This is not sarcasm; it’s authentically good to see.
They’re blaming Biden.
It started while Biden was in office due to instability in the region of central America that functioned as a wall to the rest of North America, so there is some truth to it. Trump cutting funding was the wrong thing to do at the wrong time, but the problem was already well under way when he took office.
Does the worm have a moustache?
They will bemoan it and cry there is no money due to evil democrat fraud and the worm is a hoax.
And then give Iran another 50 billion.
I love how the images of Trump trying to look “cool” always end up just adding more comic value whatever the headline or meme.
When you see an animal, there’s likely a bunch of the same species you didn’t see. Specially if it’s a small animal, with a fast lifecycle, and the animal burrows itself into something (like, dunno… the flesh of another animal?). And if the animal can live pretty much anywhere there’s another, warm-blooded, animal living. (Livestock? Wild fauna? Pets? Humans? Yes.)
So a dozen cases isn’t just “a dozen cases”, there’s likely millions of those flies in USA already. I’m taking a wild guess here and say a billion dollars won’t even scratch the surface of the problem there.
(Not that it changes things for me. Here in South America the fly in question goes from “present” to “present”. Just businesses as usual.)
I agree that “a” billion isn’t even gonna start to cover it.
Will it even EVER be controlled down to Panama again?
It will take many years.
It was pushed back down to panama before but it took half a century (1950-2000) to do it. All that effort undone by some kid named big balls.
IMO controlling it “down to Panama” is part of what went wrong, I think. Pushing further into South America would’ve been costlier, but if people managed to get those flies completely extinct, the problem wouldn’t come back.
But that requires multiple governments working together with a “helping them out means less problems for me in the future” mindset, and that simply doesn’t roll with USA; USA’s external policy was always “I’m shitting my pants so others smell it”. And working together with a bunch of dictatorships can be a bit hard, specially when those dictatorships were supported by USA so they can’t trust the United-Statian government to die properly.
They can just engineer a virus to interfere with this creature’s metabolism or reproduction, right?
That’s more or less what we’ve been doing for decades - breeding, sterilizing and releasing screwworms by the million to curb the population. It works too - but Trump & Friends axed the program, and so now it’ll cost $1bil (more than was spent over the entire lifetime of the program previously) to start it back up again (to make the subtext clear it’s because that money will be stolen)
Separated at birth?
10 million to haphazardly “eliminate” screw worm. 990 million to “contractors” that do nothing
Sadly, no. It probably will actually cost around $1B to drive screwworms back to the Darien Gap again and that’s assuming the people in charge are planning that (they’re probably not- why help poor countries?!) and capable of following a plan that already worked once (they’re not). This number will balloon out of control and their nonsense plan to hold the line at Texas will be a disaster IF it ever even comes online as it’s planned for late 2027. A preview of the planning genius.
Saving so much money, this asshole.
