Oh, good, Polimath quips, 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.
[…]
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.
In 1954, this strategy was tested on a small island of Curaçao. The screwworm was eliminated from the island in the space of seven weeks.
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.
By a happy accident of geography, Panama was an excellent choke-point for the screwworm eradication. We could effectively maintain a screwworm border in Panama with a minimal effort because the geographic area to sterilize was physically small and politically stable. This also meant that screwworm control could be maintained through limited screwworm production facilities based in Panama and managed by COPEG, a joint commission between Panama and the US. COPEG is an institution specifically founded to maintain control over the screwworm barrier in Panama.
[…]
But then something went wrong.
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.
[…]
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.
My frustration with this is less about how it started and more about how it has gone on for so long unchecked. I have a long-standing grudge against people who think that the good things we enjoy in a rich first-world civilization just landed here by accident and are not the result of relentless efforts from determined people who take very seriously the responsibility of holding back the chaos of nature red in tooth and claw.
Some group of people were in charge of holding the line on the screwworm barrier. They failed.
[…]
The screwworm barrier in Panama cost $15 million a year. This is zero dollars to the US government. This program was basically free and it protected an entire continent from billions of dollars of yearly damage.
So, this yet another benefit of open borders and free migration. Evidently, this is an unintended (?) consequence of the wholesale, heavily subsidized transport of illegal aliens into the US by the Biden administration. Or did the anti-red meat crowd piggy-back a pet project on the Biden scheme?
The cost of civilization is the vicious, perpetual, and unapologetic enforcement of civilization. The refusal to pay that cost by our leaders is their insistence that we must forego the laws of civilization and be subject to the laws of the jungle once again.
While the American experience of this seems to still be at the stage where institutional efforts could, maybe, still reverse our descent, in Europe, and the UK in particular and in light of the Belfast situation, it appears that they will have to fully embrace the fact that they are well and good back in the jungle.
D party ringers are expensive.