Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply

117 nkurz 153 5/3/2025, 6:29:50 PM bloomberg.com ↗

Comments (153)

perihelions · 15h ago
throwup238 · 15h ago
This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized by radiation (females only mate once in their lifetime so their population falls off fast). There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

Edit: Hah, I get to eat my words. Turns out USDA and APHIS have been trying to fly planes over Mexico to release the sterile flies, but the Mexican government has been restricting the flight days and denying landing permission, which has hampered the program. Looks like the Mexican bureaucracy is the one failing here, and USDA/APHIS might be running pre-emptive releases in the US (but I can't find a source on that). They just agreed to lift those restrictions and cooperate more at the end of April.

jimnotgym · 14h ago
Good job the US is on such good terms with Latin America at the moment
stevenwoo · 14h ago
It was partially the new tariffs that put a stop to the program and the April 30 agreement puts an end to tariffs on equipment associated with screwworm treatment program.
andsoitis · 15h ago
> There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

According to the article the cases are in Mexico, so I don’t know that “Latin American origin” is a silver bullet.

bastawhiz · 15h ago
Why wouldn't the USDA pay to eliminate pests in another country if it meant preventing those pests from reaching US farmers?
dessimus · 14h ago
> Why wouldn't the USDA pay...

Maybe because there is an executive body hell-bent on the slashing expenditures regardless of any perceived benefit?

tomrod · 14h ago
Perhaps their supporters should reconsider the burn-the-world-despite-who-it-hurts philosophy.
zamalek · 9h ago
Hatred is a more powerful emotion than desperacy. Votes will continue to flow towards the man, even in the face of their very own livestock being decimated.
pfdietz · 10h ago
It's not like the alternative worked very well.
margalabargala · 5h ago
It clearly did, evidence: the exact situation we are discussing.

Other evidence includes the worst measles outbreak of the last 30 years and the second largest three-month economic contraction since WWII only topped by the last iteration of this administration.

creato · 14h ago
They did exactly that for decades.
ikiris · 12h ago
Doge probably saw it as anti male propoganda. THEYRE STERALIZIN OUR FLIES
slicktux · 15h ago
Mexico is just a small portion of Latin America; A few places I can think of is Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil which have huge stockyards…
drivingmenuts · 13h ago
That competent and well-staffed bureaucracy is important also because they patiently work through these problems with their counterparts on the other side of the the Rio Grande.

Except they got fired, so now there's no one to do that work. We got what we wanted. God help us all 'cause no one else is.

dmckeon · 10h ago
And now those positions are listed as open. Disruption, but to what end. Sigh. https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961
pfdietz · 10h ago
> their population falls off fast

Superexponentially fast.

krunck · 14h ago
> This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important.

Try: "This is why a competent and well staffed science institute is so important."

Bureaucracy not required.

matthewdgreen · 14h ago
Who exactly do you think staffs this part of a science institute? Bureaucracy is just another word for the kind of well-staffed administrative system that can handle these tasks.
fallingknife · 13h ago
I think a lot of the objections here aren't really bureaucracy in terms of government employees doing things. A lot of what people mean when they complain about "government bureaucracy" is really that it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks. So discussions on this tend to get confusing.
matthewdgreen · 12h ago
The reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.

It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.

anonymars · 8h ago
Efficiency and resiliency are generally at opposite ends of a spectrum. COVID supply chain disruptions demonstrated that in spades
fallingknife · 11h ago
Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

As for the terrible salaries and mountains of political crap, that's the real issue here. But these are changeable and shouldn't just be accepted as inevitable as is so often done by defenders of government bureaucracy.

mcphage · 11h ago
> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Have you… never worked for a large company? They’re incredibly inefficient! And also, the staff cost a whole lot more.

ted_dunning · 5h ago
Can you tell me which companies have run very, very large financial systems in the US for the last 250 years?
drabbiticus · 11h ago
> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Do they?

The first two results on Google for "government vs private efficiency" are https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publicati... and https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-effic..., which both suggest that it is a myth that companies are inherently more efficient than government.

It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.

sandworm101 · 10h ago
>> generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons"

Not anymore. Great many now believe that there should be no commons, that everything should be owned by someone and leased back to those who use it. Such people see it as the duty of government to efficiently disperse the commons to the highest bidders. Those bidders will then "protect" their asset by ensuring it is put to the highest economic use.

fallingknife · 11h ago
> The report examines evidence from nine sectors - electricity, health, waste management and water, prisons, buses, ports and airports, railways and telecom,.

Yeah, if you examine only utilities and monopolies they are not more efficient than the government. That's not a surprise because they don't face competition and are heavily politically controlled.

drabbiticus · 10h ago
Do you have evidence suggesting a clear discrepancy in efficiency in other sectors?
fallingknife · 7h ago
Only every single interaction with the government I have ever had and the experience of everyone I know who works in industries where they have to deal with the government on a regular basis.
thunderfork · 10h ago
A profound number of companies fail every year and cease to exist, which is probably more inefficient (and also not an outcome that many would consider acceptable in a government context.)

Of the ones that survive[1], some may be more efficient, but whether they remain efficient, effective and extant in the long term is not a given.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

analog31 · 12h ago
Regular people (including me) think the same thing about why software projects take so long. In fact I consider engineering to be a form of bureaucracy. And I've had long conversations about it with friends who are developers, but it's still hard for an outsider to fully grasp why it's so hard. In turn, they can't understand why my job can't be replaced by AI.
jen20 · 12h ago
> it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks

Sounds just like "enterprise" IT to me, tbh.

aerostable_slug · 12h ago
Leadership can reform enterprise IT, sometimes including staffing cuts while also improving productivity. I have personally seen this happen. It can actually get better.

This is why some people are optimistic about recent efforts at doing the same in government bureaucracy. It's possible to trend upwards.

gopher_space · 10h ago
Leadership needs to be seen as both competent and trustworthy by employees to pull this off. Otherwise it’s the death spiral.
jen20 · 10h ago
I’ve seen that happen in government too: GDS. As a rule it does not though.
8note · 13h ago
the administrative parts - managers and approvers, aren't doing the science or the application thereof.

a couple university students in a van going around releasing flies every 10 miles is not a bureaucracy, nor a stand in for a bureaucracy

ryandamm · 11h ago
You think that would be sufficient? Did you read the article?

I did, and I have previously read an article in (iirc) The Atlantic about the screwfly program when it was working. It was a monumental effort to push screwflies back to the Darien Gap, involving widespread coordination of cattle ranchers and government workers, constant flyovers of planes dropping huge numbers of sterile flies, and a massive breeding program.

Two university students in a van can get about as much done as it sounds like. Some problems require coordination, government involvement, and yes, the organization — i.e., bureaucracy — that implies.

(Edit: it was The Atlantic, not The New Yorker. Comment further down has the link, but here it is: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...)

danso · 14h ago
How is a bureaucracy not required when the solution involves coordinated multinational logistics to produce and distribute hundreds of millions of flies?
johnisgood · 13h ago
Yeah because bureaucracy (in its original term) is efficient at that. /s

Wait a couple of years, and then maybe.

kergonath · 12h ago
This is surreal. The evil bureaucracy has successfully been doing it since the 1960s. It worked. And yes, it was efficient.

Now, the problem is that if you alienate your neighbours they stop wanting to play nice. Also, bureaucracies do not work when you fire civil servants indiscriminately. It’s not the bureaucracy doing this, it’s the guy who told you that the country would work better without it.

johnisgood · 11h ago
The Government is inherently ineffective, and bureaucracy, as a term, pretty much says so.

Plenty of evidence has been piling up with regarding to it.

Feel free to down-vote, does not make your Nanny State any more efficient. :D

You should read more about economics. I can give you resources.

Barrin92 · 9h ago
>bureaucracy, as a term, pretty much says so.

Bureaucracy, as per Weber, is nothing but the rational and impersonal administration of resources and exists in any sufficiently large institution, private or public. It is in fact so efficient that it is omnipresent to the point of being the defining feature of modernity, having replaced familial, personal or arbitrary rule.

Whether it's the old aristocracies of Europe replaced by the Prussian state, workshops replaced by Fordist factories, Guanxi in China replaced by modern administration, all of that is simply introduction of formal management and organization, i.e. bureaucracy.

johnisgood · 5h ago
I did not mean in it in the dictionary sense, and please do not let us delude ourselves that bureaucracy has much to do with what the dictionary says so.
kergonath · 12h ago
The science is done. We know how to deal with this insect, the American government successfully eradicated it from North America ~25 years ago. Now it’s only logistics and diplomacy.
accrual · 15h ago
This topic always leads me back to reading about the Darién Gap [0]. When eradication was working successfully, they had managed to push the screwworm population all the way back to the Gap and keep it out of major population/agriculture areas. There were (or are) yearly efforts to perform the sterile insect technique [1]. Expensive to perform, but worth it for all the damage they'd otherwise cause if left unchecked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

beached_whale · 15h ago
Not expensive at all. 10s of millions of dollars a year is my understanding.
bglazer · 14h ago
$200 million in total, approximately the cost of two (2) F35B fighter jets

https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...

janice1999 · 12h ago
Arstechnica reports it "is estimated to have saved US farmers $900 million every year." Not sure where they source the number from.

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

beached_whale · 6h ago
Ah thanks. I thought it was lower, but in the scheme of things it's still cheap and it prevents people from getting it too.
chasil · 12h ago
I had confused botflies for screw worms, but they are different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botfly

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia

snowwrestler · 15h ago
More on the screwworm barrier and how it was established. This is one of my favorite “magazine style” feature stories.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

jauntywundrkind · 15h ago
Salon had a lovely article last week, on how deteriorating relationships between US and Mexico is threatening the effective work the US had been doing of creating and spreading sterile male flies that have successfully stopped the Screwworm invasion. https://www.salon.com/2025/04/28/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-...
canucker2016 · 14h ago
Ars has an article on screwworms - 1 guess as to the writer.

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

The last word of the article has a link to a video with very unsettling imagery involving screwworms.

drumhead · 54m ago
This is going to be a test of the "new improved" post Doge USDA. We'll see how well it copes with a real agricultural crisis with reduced staffing and funds.
neuroelectron · 15h ago
Is ivermectin not an option? My fat pet rat got mites and was miserable, itchy and too painful to scratch. One grain of rice dose from the infamous horse tube cleared him right up.
unsnap_biceps · 15h ago
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3840994/ Seems to show that it does, but I guess the logistics of keeping a herd of cattle covered by giving shots every two weeks may be difficult. And there still is damage to the animal
MillironX · 12h ago
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9403981/

The article you referred to (and I've seen linked elsewhere in this thread) is about "regular" screwworm (Chrysomya bezziana). The recent outbreak is of New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax). The article I've linked suggests that it is much harder to kill than regular screwworm (29% of calves developed myiasis even when treated with ivermectin).

giardini · 7h ago
Googling "Cochliomyia hominivorax and ivermectin" yields

"Ivermectin can be an effective treatment for myiasis, a condition caused by the larvae of certain dipterous flies, including Cochliomyia hominivorax (the New World screwworm). Studies have shown that ivermectin, when administered orally or topically, can help eliminate the larvae and reduce the severity of the infestation, especially in cases of orbital or oral myiasis. "

Levitating · 6h ago
> Googling ... yields

What source are you referring to currently?

giardini · 15h ago
Ivermectin liquid "pour-on" is poured along the backbone of cattle (just as you do in cats and dogs with flea medications).
unsnap_biceps · 14h ago
The study I linked to showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin was only done subcutaneously. I did not find a study on the effectiveness of non-subcutaneous Ivermectin treatments on screw worms.

Given one of the areas they focused on the study is the scrotal area post castration, I don't expect that a pour on would cover that area well enough to be an effective treatment. Happy to read other studies if you have them showing otherwise.

neuroelectron · 14h ago
You can use it topically but typically it's an oral dose.
MillironX · 12h ago
There are injectable and transdermal (pour-on and ear tag) forms for cattle and pigs. I'm not aware of an oral formulation for food animals, even though that's pretty common for horses.
ceejayoz · 11h ago
There’s also resistance to worry about if used widely.
kergonath · 12h ago
You still need to remove them, otherwise you have decomposing maggots in an infected would, which is a great way of killing whatever you were trying to save.
reverendsteveii · 15h ago
It's a great day to be heavily punishing imports!
heresie-dabord · 14h ago
Heavily punishing your own citizens for buying imported goods in a highly-integrated global economy.
scandox · 13h ago
I first learned about these delightful creatures after reading The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution

unfitted2545 · 15h ago
good day to be a vegan.
vips7L · 15h ago
It’s always a good day to not participate in the cruelty and evil that is animal farming.
timschmidt · 14h ago
There's a big difference between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_op... and traditional family farms. In a traditional family farm, animals can live happy and relatively full lives while offsetting a tremendous amount of petroleum products in the form of fuel, insecticide, herbicide, fertilizer, equipment, etc.
aziaziazi · 13h ago
> traditional family farms.

> relatively full lives

Thanks to point out the difference between industrial and family farm. However I'm not sure what farms in particular you have in mind but anything commercial has non incentive to let the animal live a "relatively full life": the meat of a relatively old animal taste far from what people are used to eat and is (way) more expensive to produce. Some producers add a few weeks to the legal minimum to let them grow a bit more but nothing near their natural expectancy. Lets take chickens for exemple, here in EU:

- standard are harvest 35 days (32 if for export)

- certified (floor, outdoor) at 56 days

- highest quality (Bio and local certifications): 81 day

- egg poultry final harvest: around 1 year and half when egg production slow down

- natural life expectancy of a chicken: 8-10 years.

> can live happy

"happier" would be more accurate IMHO but as some people point our frequently: we can't know for sure how another animal feels so it's only guess. What we can do is remove the farm fences and do not force them onto the slaughter house. They'll choose themselves to go to what makes them happy.

timschmidt · 12h ago
I come from Mennonites. Plenty of animals on the farm are allowed to live full lives. Anything doing any kind of work can be, which all animals on the farm are capable of. Milk and eggs don't require culling. Even layers past their prime will still eat pests and scratch manure into the soil and teach the young to do same.

Joel Salatin practices the sort of farming I'm familiar with: https://www.youtube.com/@farmlikealunatic

This is what happy chickens look like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VHvDEzpD5es

and happy pigs: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B6qk0IbCC5U

The figures you quote are not for heritage breeds. They are for breeds which have been selected for extremely rapid growth, often to the detriment of the health of the animal (and presumably the person consuming them).

> the meat of a relatively old animal taste far from what people are used to eat and is (way) more expensive to produce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq_au_vin has been the definition of a peasant dish for a century or two at least.

> but as some people point our frequently: we can't know for sure how another animal feels so it's only guess.

Anyone who's spent time with animals knows. As surely as you know if your dog is happy. People are the ones who hide their feelings.

orwin · 8h ago
Our poultry didn't last more than a year either, and we weren't factory farming. We bought 15 chicken every year, 3 male to eat before they were fertile early spring, 12 female that we ate during the next winter. And half a dozen rabbits too. Then my grandparents grew too tired and started to travel instead of farming/taking care of poultry.

The animals might have been happy (or, at least happier than in a factory farm), but clearly their life were short.

timschmidt · 8h ago
That's fair. Most animals raised expressly for slaughter will be culled young.
vacuity · 11h ago
This can be true, but for the commercial side of things it is both not what generally happens and not what is generally feasible to happen.
timschmidt · 11h ago
You don't get it at the supermarket, that's for sure. But I can get it at my local farmers market. You may be able to too. I would argue that it's entirely feasible, but depends on priorities. Most people prioritize profits, convenience, and speed.
chneu · 11h ago
No there isn't. This is just stuff y'all tell yourselves to make ya feel better about your cruelty and over consumption.
timschmidt · 11h ago
What I'm reading here is that you feel cruel and selfish, and some sort of restrictive diet is your self-punishment. And denying other people's lived experiences is necessary to reinforce the self-punishment.

You don't know me, or my experiences, or circumstances. Only your own. So I don't see how it could be any other way. I hope you feel better, friend. And that whoever made you feel that way learns better.

vips7L · 13h ago
Whatever lets you sleep at night my friend.
timschmidt · 12h ago
You ever watch a plant filmed in time lapse? They're active just like animals. They feel and communicate and are our relatives just the same. Everything on this planet eats a living cousin, save for the photo and chemosynthesizers. Such is life. The similarity of our proteins and other molecules is exactly what makes us nutritious to each other. I sleep just fine. The backyard garden is fruitful. The chimkins are happy and laying eggs. Thankful for the opportunity to enjoy it!
vips7L · 11h ago
Please stop lying to yourself. You know damn well eating a plant and an animal are completely different things.

You wouldn’t be saying these things if the aliens came and harvested your children for food.

timschmidt · 10h ago
Not to me they aren't.

I once watched a film of a persistence hunter approaching the prey he'd chased for miles. He spoke to it, approached it calmly, sat with it and caressed it, put it's head on his lap and held it for a minute, petting it like a dog and shushing and whispering to it. And then he cut it's throat, and cried as it died.

That's what living on the farm is like. That's real life, fully and authentically felt. In my opinion, all the living things I eat deserve such respect and reverence for furthering my life.

You can feel differently. Lots of folks do.

> You wouldn’t be saying these things if the aliens came and harvested your children for food.

What if the aliens look like plants? What if they're here already? What if they're your distant cousin?

Funny thing - when you look at single celled organisms like bacteria and yeasts under a microscope, they engage in behaviors which seem shockingly like animal behaviors. They seem to explore their environment, have senses, hunt and eat, reproduce, and notably, they seem to dislike specific stimuli. They really meet every definition I can think of for a being which appears to be conscious, including memory, and we eat them by the billions without even knowing.

unfitted2545 · 1h ago
You can take the panpsychic view if you want (with no actual evidence), but it doesn't change the fact that we know non human animals suffer. Countlessly exploiting their entire population, for what?

> all the living things I eat deserve such respect and reverence

How does that help them when you're consuming their flesh without consent? Let's all fornicate with these animals, just make sure to show respect after!

I can kinda understand how factory farming is the bad bit as opposed to a traditional farming, but you have to stop and think, who are we to decide these other beings lives?

herpdyderp · 9h ago
These infect humans too, vegan or not.
danso · 14h ago
Tangential aside but what does this mean:

> live demonstrations on how to handle cattle to reduce stress.(Every cow pie released by a stressed-out cow before it gets weighed by meat processers amounts to $6 in lost profit.)

unsnap_biceps · 14h ago
Ranchers get paid a flat per pound price for whole animals. When they take a shit, their total weight goes down and thus the ranchers lose the flat per pound price for that pile of shit, which evidently is about $6.
andsoitis · 15h ago
” Now, after being eradicated from the US since the early 1980s and largely forgotten, top veterinarians expect the screwworm could be back as soon as the summer. More than 950 cases have been reported in Mexico so far this year, including one within miles of a livestock checkpoint in Chiapas. A resurgence in the US would have devastating consequences for farm animals and wildlife”
e40 · 15h ago
I was surprised to learn recently that we import a LOT of cattle. It's the reason many other countries will not take US beef, because the provenance of our beef isn't as precise as it needs to be, for those foreign consumer laws.
chneu · 11h ago
We also treat our cows with antibiotics that a lot of countries ban. A lot of our meat is also treated with chemicals that other countries ban.

It's why Europe won't import a lot of US beef.

ujkhsjkdhf234 · 15h ago
This is true of a lot of our food. Trump, now and in 2016, has been trying to force the UK to buy US chicken and the Brits are NOT having it because US food standards are below that of the UK.

No comments yet

giardini · 15h ago
Ivermectin kills screwworm. We've been using ivermectin regularly for years on Texas cattle. And there are other ways to deal with screwworm as the article states. Let the farmers and the appropriate agencies deal with it.

Should you get screwworm see a doctor. If you can't afford a doctor or are an illegal alien and have screwworm then go to a local Texas rancho and help apply ivermectin to their cattle. They will appreciate the help and you'll get enough slathered on you to last a year.

Loughla · 15h ago
How will you treat the wild animal population?

Or are you assuming that just treating livestock will solve the problem?

RecycledEle · 15h ago
Lots of things hurt cattle, but they do not threaten our domestic beef supply. They are just things for farmers and ranchers to deal with.

Think of it this way: Leaving lug nuts loose in new cars does not threaten our nation's auto supply.

cyberge99 · 15h ago
Sure it does if you loosen enough of them to create hysteria.
giardini · 14h ago
Spoken like a true saboteur.

But how many lug nuts must you loosen to create hysteria?

And why do I have the peculiar feeling that you've never held a lug wrench in your hands?

ben_w · 13h ago
15. Assuming 5 per wheel and applying the proverb of "three men make a tiger"*, they just have to be the new cars of three famous people who are likely to get in the news for a wheel falling off.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger

RecycledEle · 15h ago
You can set out free (medicated) food for the wildlife. That will treat the vast majority of them.
janice1999 · 12h ago
That might work for once-off vaccinations of precisely targeted animals in densely populated areas but not delivering periodic high doses of medication to treat parasites to animals across 100s of millions of acres.
giardini · 14h ago
Loughla says: "How will you treat the wild animal population?"

Hunt 'em and eat 'em, yummm! If you're tough enough, as I do not doubt, you can eat the screwworms too, once cooked!8-))

orwin · 8h ago
You have two types of screwworms, the common, and the south American. Are you sure ivermectin is as efficient against the species they're talking about?
yieldcrv · 15h ago
(Which is why it worked in that region of the country against covid

Human hosts already had the worms too

and it still killed the worms, allowing their own immune system to function correctly again)

davidw · 15h ago
Quick, get those cattle a special preparation of carrot juice, cod liver oil and turmeric, stat!
aaronbrethorst · 15h ago
Ironically I bet ivermectin would actually be useful here.
giardini · 14h ago
It is, but there is no "silver bullet" for idiocy, as you can see.
alganet · 14h ago
There is: stop measuring intelligence.
mlinhares · 14h ago
We're getting there. Soon numbers and statistics will be meaningless.
alganet · 13h ago
I don't understand what you mean by that.

What I'm saying is that intelligence is impossible to measure.

sandworm101 · 14h ago
Wrong type of worms. These are fly larva. Invermectin is useful against intestinal and heartworms.
TeaBrain · 12h ago
This old study found ivermectin efficacious in treating screw worm infected cattle:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-0813....

nkurz · 12h ago
I appreciate the attempt to ground the discussion in research, but as MillironX pointed out elsewhere, ivermectin turns out to be less effective on Cochliomyia hominivorax (which the article is about) than on Chrysomya bezziana (which the paper you cited is about).
TeaBrain · 9h ago
That is interesting, although I'm not seeing the comment you're referencing. I read the article this morning, but I hadn't noted that there were possibly multiple types of screw worm. Looks like the Cochliomyia hominivorax is only one that the Americas typically have to deal with, so that was the only one that made sense in the context. However, that a anti-parasitic is more effective at killing one type of screw worm than another doesn't mean much by itself. That statement would hold true even if it had 99% efficacy against one type vs 98% efficacy against another.
labster · 15h ago
Oh well, we can just import beef with our renowned free trade policies.
Krasnol · 15h ago
> “New World Screwworm: The Threat Returns.”

I love this. The whole country is like movie theme parks patched together seamlessly.

I wonder how the king will frame this.

andsoitis · 15h ago
> I wonder how the king will frame this.

The screwworm cases are in Mexico according to the article, threatening Texas / US cattle. So the framing would be pretty straightforward. One can imagine the word “vermin” rearing its head.

kylehotchkiss · 15h ago
With this and bird flu and inflation, it wouldn’t hurt people to learn to eat less meat throughout the week. A day or two vegetarian so if any of these things escalate at least you have a feel for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯