The maggots can cause painful, rapidly enlarging deep wounds, which can destroy muscle, cartilage, and bone—even the skull—if not caught quickly.
So glad we have adults in charge of the USA to help us avoid these horrors…….
It’s fine, they don’t cause autism.
Didn’t trump defund the specific team that was focused on monitoring and addressing this issue?
There was an allegation that DOGE cut the funding for a USAID program to control screwworm outside US borders, last year, in 2025:
Bird flu, screwworm monitoring among foreign aid programs killed by Trump – Agri-Pulse
Snopes has an article about this claim, in which they allege that Agri-Pulse’s “person familiar with the situation granted anonymity” is the only source in the entire media sphere for this specific claim. Snopes says they have a policy against trusting anonymous sources alone. So, rather bizarrely, Snopes looks to DOGE’s own reports, which are demonstrably at odds with other information in some pretty glaring ways. Almost like they were made up.
You would think the people who were actually involved in doing the work and administration could say exactly what happened to their program. Snopes doesn’t mention pursuing such avenues.
I’m kind of disappointed in Snopes. They don’t really have anything to add, I don’t know why they bothered publishing this.
I’m not any sort of expert on this story, I just happened to be reading about it earlier today.
yes, yes he did.
I’m sure that will totally stabilize already inflated grocery prices.
Isn’t there like a giant wild boar population down there too? Nice breeding ground.
Plagues anyone?
The New World screwworm (NWS) fly was once endemic in Mexico—as well as the US. The flies lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds, inflamed tissue, mucous membranes, and orifices of warm-blooded creatures. The resulting maggots hatch within a day and begin ravenously feasting on the living flesh of their victims. While the fly’s maggots generate ghastly, life-threatening wounds in a variety of warm-blooded species, including humans, they’re particularly devastating to livestock.
Amid a decades-long eradication effort, the fly’s populations were wiped out from the US, Mexico, and Central America. This was largely done with massive aerial releases of sterilized male flies, a technique that works because female NWS flies only mate once in their lifespans. Mexico declared NWS eradicated in 2003. Panama declared eradication in 2006 and kept an active, biological barrier along the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. But in 2022, the barrier was breached, and Mexico began seeing cases in animals in 2024.
Since the breach, there have been more than 36,000 animal cases of NWS in Mexico, with nearly 2,000 active as of August 5, according to the US Department of Agriculture. While human NWS infections—called myiasis—are a small fraction of the overall cases, the infestations can be severe and horrifying. The maggots can cause painful, rapidly enlarging deep wounds, which can destroy muscle, cartilage, and bone—even the skull—if not caught quickly. The wounds pose the risk of irreparable damage, secondary infection, sepsis, and, in extreme cases, death.
Collective problems require collective solutions, America cannot solve this problem with each nation working alone, indeed if even one large “united” nation in the northern part decides to violently flaunt logic everyone will be irreperably harmed.
Since we’re on the subject of real life horrors, what happens when the borders of this outbreak overlap the borders of the current ebola outbreak?
This is a real question for any medical professionals in the chat, btw. I believe it’s highly likely we’ll see spread of the latter beyond Africa given the collapse of US disease control support under the current administration.
