The 'Man-Eater' Screwworm Is Coming

62 fortran77 45 5/28/2025, 12:37:07 PM theatlantic.com ↗

Comments (45)

tomhow · 1d ago

Discussed 25 days ago:

Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881065 - May 2025 (180 comments)

No comments yet

acidburnNSA · 1d ago

I helped get a 1960 documentary film showing the details of how we eradicated the screwworm with radiation digitized and posted here [1]. Kinda gross but worth seeing to help emphasize how bad these things are.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFoOnS6CWSI

abrookewood · 1d ago

That is incredibly gruesome.

fortran77 · 1d ago

How do the people handling the pre-sterilized flies manage not to have eggs laid on them?

woleium · 1d ago

i believe they sterilized the pupae, but they must have had a breeding zone. I can’t imagine how awful that area of the facility would look and smell.

walthamstow · 1d ago

> The barrier, as I observed when I reported from Panama several years ago, consisted of planes releasing millions of sterile screwworms to rain down over the Darién Gap every week

This reminds me of the Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk. It's one of the millions of little things the US Gov does to manage risk to the USA, its neighbouring countries and the world at large.

AlecSchueler · 1d ago

Sounds like something DOGE should put a stop to. Why manage risks in neighbouring countries and the world at large unless they're paying for it?

nyc_data_geek1 · 1d ago

Might want to tag that as /s, because in these idiotic times, people might read it as stated sincerely.

We'll all recollect, very soon and very clearly, exactly why managing risks such as these is very much worth it, and necessitates a degree of centralized government capability to do so, methinks.

walthamstow · 1d ago

Freeloaders!

juancn · 1d ago

It's fairly common in Argentina in cattle (also in Brazil).

Time for a gruesome anecdote!

My dad is a retired ophthalmologist (eye doctor), he used to do residences in a public hospital specialized on eyes for the Greater Buenos Aires area (several million people nearby, so you see all kinds of weird crap).

Once I asked him what was the nastiest case he had attended and he told me it was one of a drunk guy that passed out and slept with his eyes not fully closed.

While asleep the flies laid eggs on the eyeball, he waited too long to go to a hospital and my dad had to take the worms one by one from the poor dude's eyes.

He survived but lost both eyes.

Normally is mostly dangerous only to animals, there are sprays you can put on a wound that will kill the larvae and help the animal heal.

jasongill · 1d ago

https://archive.ph/S4R3g

koolba · 1d ago

Good news is that Ivermectin works to kill the worm larvae: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3840994/

OutOfHere · 1d ago

For humans, ivermectin is available not only as a tablet, but also as a skin cream. Both seem necessary and useful for the condition.

Levitating · 1d ago

This was also discussed last month.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881065 (24 days ago, 129 points)

masswerk · 1d ago

Ars Technica had an article on this on 2 May:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/05/screwworms-are-coming...

lantry · 1d ago

gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...

goda90 · 1d ago

While this can probably be explained by flaws in the program, I wonder if there's a chance of an evolutionary jump that would help the screwworms overcome the sterilization program. Increased radiation resistance, females mating multiple times, self-fertilization, etc.

eigenspace · 1d ago

What do you find unconvincing about the claim from the article that it has to do with black market cattle trade?

goda90 · 1d ago

I don't find anything unconvincing about it. The program is flawed because it doesn't account for cattle smuggling. My comment is about evolutionary pressure to bypass our control methods.

Brian_K_White · 1d ago

it was just an interesting related thought, not a fight

api · 1d ago

People really are not aware of how much the US government does both nationally and globally to maintain a Pax Americana, and not just against terrorists or rogue states. It also does so against agricultural pests, diseases, etc.

otikik · 1d ago

“People” here includes the US government as well

taylodl · 1d ago

Specifically, DOGE

littlestymaar · 1d ago

Decades of anti-government talking points being broadcasted all day long, and here the result: now many people have forgotten why governments exist.

The reminder is going to be brutal unfortunately…

blooalien · 1d ago

> ... many people have forgotten why governments exist.

Many governments have forgotten why they exist too, sadly...

missingdays · 1d ago

As if the animal agriculture wasn't horrible enough

1970-01-01 · 1d ago

Silver lining: the next Tremors movie will not be yet another franchise reboot :)

vouaobrasil · 1d ago

We kinda did this to ourselves, as we insisted on eating vast quantities of meat for billions, which likely caused a huge range expansion [1]. And global warming is likely to make it worse [2]. I can't help but think it's a bit of karma – if everyone just ate meat once a month we could have much less livestock and a much more manageable screwworm problem.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jme/article-abstract/48/2/280/89277... [2] https://resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/...

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osigurdson · 1d ago

Life is too short to worry about bugs.

catigula · 1d ago

>How screwworms managed to jump the barrier in 2022 is not fully clear. But in the years immediately before, the coronavirus pandemic reportedly created supply-chain snarls at the fly factory in Panama and disrupted regular cattle inspections that might have set off the alarm bells earlier. And the border between Panama and Colombia got a lot busier; the Darién Gap, once a notoriously impenetrable jungle, became a popular route for migrants.

This seems to imply that the situation is fairly clear and was caused by mass migration.

Not a great feather to have in your cap as a statesman.

intended · 1d ago

The very next sentence reads::

> Still, the screwworm advanced relatively slowly through Panama and Costa Rica for the first couple of years. Then it hit Nicaragua, and over just 10 weeks in 2024, it shot from the country’s northern border through Honduras and Guatemala to reach Mexico. This rapid advance was because of the illegal cattle trade,

Furthermore - given the attitudes we see in America, it seems clear there is no appetite for projects that other countries don’t pay for. From how I understand the rhetoric is made,

“this was a subsidy for cattle farmers, and for other nations, which should have picked up the slack on their own. “

woleium · 1d ago

how to destroy all good will towards the usa in three easy steps.

ctkhn · 1d ago

The real issue is that we didn't carry the program further south past panama and used the darien gap as a choke point to keep ourselves safe. Maybe if we had some more solidarity with south americans, the worm could have been eliminated from the hemisphere.

BriggyDwiggs42 · 1d ago

They say later in the article it’s because of illegal cattle smuggling, which makes sense.

mark_l_watson · 1d ago

Interesting article! Also good to see what we have done, and anything done with international cooperation is almost always a good thing.

Off topic, but it is good to see The Atlantic back to doing non-political quality journalism! As a company they had gone down a dark partisan rabbit hole of just propagandizing for one political party.

I had blocked The Atlantic in Apple News, now I am going to start reading them again.

542354234235 · 1d ago

If doing quality journalism ends up being negative for one political party, the problem might not be with the journalists.

lan321 · 1d ago

Meh. Any journalist or corpo that never praises actions of party X and never critises actions of party Y is sketchy. As someone with finite time it's one of my main propaganda detectors. Don't know if they were like that, parent seems to go in that direction.

mark_l_watson · 1d ago

Exactly right, and also: except for election seasons I budget only about an hour a week for news and politics, but a little more for geopolitical and geo financial material. I choose a few sources, stick with them for a month or two, then move on. Lately I have been enjoying news from sources in Singapore, and I like the Israeli news outlet Harretz because they seem to cover both sides of issues.

mark_l_watson · 1d ago

Given the poor candidates running in the last election, I don’t blame anyone for criticizing either candidate. Still, sources like PBS and The Atlantic that have close to 100% of their employees in one political party simply become less interesting.

Anyway, apologies for the political post earlier. On re-reading my original post I see how it is politically charged, something I like to avoid. Hopefully my previous post gets downvoted into oblivion.

blipvert · 1d ago

Wow. In light of an administration that is bent on destroying the soft power that the US has built up over decades, slashing funding for the kind of programs which make tackling these kinds of challenges possible, and with a guy in charge of public health who had a worm burrow into his brain and die this is quite the comment!

mark_l_watson · 1d ago

+1 I upvoted you, your comment seems like an honest opinion.

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The 'Man-Eater' Screwworm Is Coming

Comments (45)