A flesh-eating parasitic fly has spread north through Mexico to within a few hundred miles of the U.S. southern border. The New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) lays its eggs in open wounds and in the orifices of live, warm-blooded animals—including, occasionally, humans. The maggots then devour the animal's flesh, causing devastating lesions that can quickly kill the infested host.

A flesh-eating parasitic fly has spread north through Mexico to within a few hundred miles of the U.S. southern border. The New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) lays its eggs in open wounds and in the orifices of live, warm-blooded animals—including, occasionally, humans. The maggots then devour the animal’s flesh, causing devastating lesions that can quickly kill the infested host.

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  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
    12·
    9 hours ago

    In fact, yes! Yes it can be stopped. And it had been stopped for a long time due to a sterile screw worm breeding facility in (iirc) Panama funded in part by the US.

    You see, screw worm fly females only breed once while males are promiscuous. So, if you breed and irradiate enough male screw worm flies to sterilize them and then release them into the wild, they effectively breed with large numbers of female flies without producing any offspring. Then the females, heartbroken, never mate again.

    However, you see, funding MEXICAN FLY BORDELLOS in Panama is… woke? I guess? And so the Trump admin stopped that nonsense in Trump 1. Without funding, the facility could not produce as many irradiated males, allowing the screw worm population to recover - undoing many years of progress. Iirc Biden started it back up, but too little too late and Trump 2 shut it down again anyway.

    I don’t know what happened to the plan, but the Trump admin was going to have to fund a $10B (iirc) MEXICAN FLY BORDELLO in Texas since they fucked up the working one in Panama. I assume Don Jr owns it or something. It cost like $10M a year or something to fund the one in Panama, but sure - it’s probably worth it to pay 100 years of that funding to open a facility in Texas for no reason because MMFBAA (Make Mexican Fly Bordellos American Again).