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.)
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.
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.