People think the sunbelt population boom was all about AC becoming widely available. Yes, AC played a huge role. Also, not having extremely painful fly larva burrow into any open wound, mucus membrane. Believe it or not, that was something of a turn off for people prior to the eradication campaign of the 50s. Time to start wearing long sleeves and layers again.
But hey, at least we saved a few million dollars by not adequately funding the facilities that kept screwworms south of the Darien Gap. It should only cost a few billion to repeat the eradication campaign this time around.
Screwworm all out attack!
This is the one that kills cattle?
yes, and infect pets and can infect people, though that’s not it’s primary target.
it’s fucking awful. and it’s easily preventable. but we simply stopped doing the hard work of prevention because of cost-cutting.
At least we have all the ivermectin?
They’re coming for the rest of you, Kennedy!
5 earthquakes in the past 7 days, a meteor OVER a volcano, pestilence…
We’re cooked.
Meh. The human race is a plague in general.
I’m all for humanity waging a bio war against all human parasites that if decimated would have no biological impact.
If we ever want to gene drive these fuckers out of existence, cutting science funding was probably a bad call.
I don’t know about the southern border of Texas, but much of the Southern / South-Eastern USA is experiencing varying degrees of drought this spring with very little relief in sight. The last time things were this bad in my part of the country was about 20 - 25 years ago.
I wonder how that will play into the spread of these parasites. Will they spread more quickly due to sicker/weaker wild populations of host animals spreading out trying to find ever more scarce food and water resources?
It’s not quite the same thing, but that prior major drought I mentioned from a couple decades ago is widely discussed as having been the source event for the spread of fire ants to my area. A lot of our agricultural products like animal feeds are grown, produced, and consumed locally. However, in drought years, things like hay have to be transported in from other parts of the country and it’s believed that the fire ants hitched a ride from out of state that way.
To anyone confused as I was, they are talking about a location in Mexico roughly 31 miles away from the USA border, not 31 miles of border length.
RFK Jr. has immediately flown to the area to play with, and possibly eat them.
Praise Shai Hulud!
Do you think he’ll bring his grandkids, like as a snack for the screw worms?
Conservative policy cut funding to keeping these away. Conservatives should be seen not heard when it comes to any policy.
The public health boomerang
Yeah, Elon said “Millions of dollars for breeding radioactive flies?!? What kind of dumb science stuff is this‽ Fraud, waste, and abuse!”
As likely as that is, it’s important to note that was step 3 in the screwworm failure.
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Covid supply chain issues raised alarms that hey, that little lab we have in Panama protecting ~100M people and the livestock industries of several nations might need some emergency support, funding. The Trump Administration did not raise to the challenge. [note: the cause of the Darian Gap failure is “contested” because some people think it just, you know, happened or something, man]
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The Biden Administration’s initial position, as is the Democrat way, was to assume the status quo their predecessors strived to create was good enough. When it became obvious this was not the case they sprung into forming a committee to create a plan to monitor the situation and collaborate with foreign entities who were completely incapable of handling this issue, since institutional knowledge of a problem solved 40 years ago was gone. Apparently process documentation is a problem in all human endeavors. To their credit, when screwworms hit Mexico the administration did halt livestock border crossings and quadruple the Panama facility’s output.
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Trump takes over, does fuckall for half a year, then USDA announces they’ll build a $750M screwworm facility in Texas. Experts note this facility is about 3,000 km from the Darian Gap, but hey, can’t be sending American money to some shithole amirite? Luckily the facility will be online in late 2027 barring certain delays, so as long as the screwworm’s northern spread slows by orders of magnitude for no reason we’ll be covered.
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Fraud, waste, and abuse
I got so very sick of seeing those assholes all repeating that line in the first part of 2025. It sounded like they all had an alien parasite that crawled into their heads.
Especially that grinning idiot of a chipmunk, Kevin Hassett.
What I find so annoying is that none of these asshats seemed to get put on the spot to have to define just what that even means. It’s like they just rode on the myth of the $600 hammer “government bad” stuff and it was/is all so very stupid…
Anything that helps the poor: “fraud, waste, and abuse!”
Anything that transfers wealth from taxpayers to the rich (especially Elon): “NBD, that’s just business”
Apparently conflict of interest means nothing anymore. Or collusion, embezzlement, or emoluments…
IIRC, they were being stopped at the choke point in Central America. Now that they’re past it, they’ll be almost possible to contain even if funding were restored.
Just one of many cases where the damage being done is permanent.
It can be stopped again but god damn will it not be cheap.
That sumbitch!!!
If you haven’t seen the image of what these things can do to a deer, I’d highly advise against looking for the pic unless you have a strong stomach.
I have seen the damage they do to cows and horses in real life and it’s nightmarish. My father got one in his arm once, this was before I was born but luckily he got it out before it did much harm.
Their name is enough
I took that bait and can confirm you should not look up the images. I need to lay down.
Pffft wimps.
Mother of God… what even… why did I do that!!!
Right? I mean, I guess that’s pretty much where I saw 2026 going anyway. 😅
You warned me and I still did it.
Can we have covid back instead?
Haven’t they already been in the US for a while now? I recall hearing about an infestation in Texas some time ago.
they used to be rampant in the southern States. a huge multinational effort pushed them back down south.
1/2 as Interesting also did a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
Was that something cut by doge?
iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries “for free” (even though they already chip in).
More or less.
