Why is it "used to be"? I've heard about the program before and thought it was incredible. What happened to it?
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
Funding was recently cut but this infestation has been building for years. The key failure that caused this current outbreak was during COVID. The lockdowns shut down both the release flights by the US and the mosquito breeding facilities in Latina America, grinding the whole pest control program to a halt.
From the other link on the front page about this subject [1]:
> Illegal cattle smuggling, long considered one of the most efficient money-laundering routes for the drug cartels which terrorised San Pedro Sula, is regarded as the main reason for the accelerating advance. Up to 800,000 cattle a year are illicitly raised in nature reserves, such as the UNESCO-protected Rio Platano Biosphere in Honduras, and then smuggled by boat and truck up to Mexico. The flies, of course, travel with the livestock, embedded in cattle hides, accelerating their advance.
> “Everything indicates that illegal cattle routes from Central America are the arteries through which the screw worm is circulating again toward Mexico,” wrote Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerican and the Western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a recent paper.
So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics. Meanwhile, I had no idea that cattle smuggling was a money-laundering route for drug cartels. TIL!
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
I follow your intended meaning (USAID & etc cuts). But taken literally it's US policies and propaganda that enable the drug cartels. Our dysfunctions are still ultimately the root of the problem.
OK, so let me be even more explicit: for those who continue to want to connect this to recent changes in the US political system, the relationship is tenuous, at best.
The world is complex and interdependent. The US, being a powerful and influential country, has direct or indirect involvement in pretty much everything. That doesn't mean we are to blame for everything.
I agree. We certainly aren't at fault for the existence of organized crime in general. However our aggressively exported drug policy is very obviously the root that props up the Mexican and South American drug cartels (among others). There's decades of academic literature and economic analysis on this point.
When a parasite is spreading due to a large scale money laundering tactic by a large scale criminal enterprise whose scale is only enabled by our policy I class that as yet another own goal of the war on drugs.
These downstream effects are somewhat non obvious so I think it's worthwhile to point them out when they come up.
Good thing we are considering approving military force against the cartels. Optimally those large scale criminal enterprises will soon find themselves to be of much smaller scale after we start drone striking them. The cartels are already being hurt by the increased security along our southern borders as well as the large crackdown from Mexican authorities as they seek to appease Trump.
Incredible that we could have been doing this the whole time, we just chose not to. We just chose to allow the cartels to act in whatever way they saw fit and to cross our border with their poison and violence whenever they wanted.
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
Right now, as the world turns, we have the greatest number of appointees in positions of governmental influence on policies, that have no idea what they are doing because of a lack of expertise. Almost all these vital positions are politically appointed by the current administration. Need an example: soon the policies of JFK jr., God help us, are going to, unfortunately, prove my point.
Yeah, the way we’re turning our backs on one of the most important medical miracles in recent years is horrifying. I hope COVID or something worse doesn’t cause too much carnage.
While I am a vegetarian and thus am an existence proof, there's multiple different ways in which something can be "essential".
Anyone going "let's stop a thing today which will messes with a non-trivial fraction of our food production in a few years' time, without preparing either that food sector nor the dietary choices of the consumers before that happens" is definitely making a high-risk strategic choice.
Already happening. Beef is rapidly becomming unaffordable. A steak at the supermarket is >$20. Can't imagine what they cost at a restaurant. I've switched to mostly turkey, chicken, and pork.
Maybe for a USDA Prime ribeye or tenderloin at Bristol Farms or something.
If you go to an ethnic store like Arabic halaal markets, ribeye steaks can be had for less than $10 a pound (but they’re ungraded). In one of the highest CoL areas in Southern California. Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are $20/pound and ribeye rounds are $25/pound.
That's due to issues around monopolization in the Dairy and Cattle industry in the US [1].
70% of all processors in the dairy and cattle industry are now owned by 3 companies. Processors don't own cattle - they just process raw material like dairy and meat into cheese and pasteurized milk and handle the entire supply chain. But because they control the supply chain, distribution, and even the feed [0] used they can set rates and vendors used by farmers.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
This isn't true in Canada and we're seeing as big of price increases for beef, greater than the US for ground beef. This is a supply issue while demand has increased. Drought and costs have also impacted herd size
Packer and ag consolidation is a huge problem, but the underlying issue here is climate change and long-lasting droughts; some of the issues with herd size — the smallest since about 1950 — come from COVID hangover when cows weren’t getting processed and price-per-head plummeted, but the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed. We’re looking at long-term cost trends that are unlikely to reverse or even be significantly ameliorated anytime soon.
> the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed
Ranchers that can support large herds (2,000+) are those who earn a net profit [0] and are consolidating because processors do not want to support small farms.
While environmental factors do play a role, saying it's the primary reason is greenwashing of the real oligopolies tendencies arising in American Ag industry.
Is this supported by the data? During the pandemic people were also blaming "monopolization" or "consolidation" for the rise in grocery prices, but in reality the margins of publicly traded supermarket companies went up by a percentage point or two.
It's certainly meaningful for the company involved, but a 1% increase in grocer margins means a $100 grocery bill becomes $101. It's at best an incomplete explanation for the ~20% price increase on grocery prices between 2021 and 2023.
Yep. To quote The Bullvine [0] (Axios for the cattle and dairy industry):
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
Also [1]
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The fact that a country like India can support 228 milk cooperatives each generating around $500M-2B in revenue and outcompete American dairy+cattle in production and even reducing environmental impact with marginal subsidizes [2] means distribution+processing consolidation and it's side effects (cattle monoculture, non-competitive prices given to farmers, dairy processers NOW becoming animal feed manufacturers) are a good example of market failures due to oligopolic control.
No one at the WI and MI state Dem level is chatting about this based on some of my own meeting with them recently. This is the kind of swing vote topic that can flip all 3 branches of government in 26 and 28.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the opportunity this provides. 84% of Americans consume dairy and dairy products [3] - this is an easy win if some sympathy was provided.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
Market failures due to oligarchic control is the natural end state of capitalism. Everything is going as intended, the point of the system is to produce oligarchs, not efficient markets.
It is mainstream economic and political opinion to regulate in some manner to reduce market consolidation since the 1940s with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index.
I think necessarily. I don’t think it’s possible to devise a capitalist system that doesn’t devolve into oligarchic control. Markets can’t be regulated like the theory wants, because capitalists just use their wealth to take over the politicians. They are able to do this because they control so much wealth. To prevent this hack, you’d have to take control of capital away from the capitalists, thus defeating the core idea of capitalism.
or find other ways to reduce the influence of money on public elections -- see eg Prof. Lessig (of "Creative Commons" fame) and his writings on "Fix Congress First" which led to Rootstrikers.org
She was starting to concentrate on the Ag consolidation [0] but my interpretation is she targeted tech first due to the industry's somewhat weaker political position in both admins.
She also didn't touch Comcast - and they are the kingmakers in PA and DE.
By "data" I was referring to data to support the claim that consolidation led to increase in prices (eg. margin expansion), not that consolidation was happening at all. It's the same with supermarkets. There's no doubt that consolidation was happening, and there's even evidence that it led to higher prices, but the absolute effect on grocery bills seems to be marginal.
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors [1] which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 228 local run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players each generating around $500M-2B in revenue.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the value this train of thought can have in 2026 and 2028.
84% of Americans consume dairy or dairy alternative (still synthesized using dairy) products [2] - don't make this yet another culture war topic
>India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle
That's a tad misleading. The statistics I could find only says that India outproduces the US in dairy, not beef. Rounding
>yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0]
I did a cursory search in your source for "carbon" and "methane" and couldn't find anything to back this claim, only vague claims about how India does "Regenerative farming" and is therefore "low methane".
>because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
That's not scalable and only works because the country is poor and beef/dairy consumption isn't high. There's no way you can supply American level demand for beef/dairy by only using crop residue.
>American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
You can easily tell an opposite story about how consolidate companies have bigger budgets for R&D and capital projects, as opposed to 26 cooperatives each trying to implement some sort of strategy.
Regardless, it's terrible to have around you. Your dog will have it too if let be. they do need to be controlled if it gets out of hand. Better now than when its a bigger problem.
The funding was never cut. That was misinfo spread by morons because there was a typical Trump dispute of "mexico will pay for it". But the reality was that was in talks of a Mexico specific coverage program. The Panama program was never touched and is run by a third party agency with stakes holders consisting of the USDA and Panama government.
But yes the current outbreak built up since COVID.
Question, are they morons? Is your disagreement with them really that simple? Was it necessary to call them that? I don't like posting this comment, because it will be distracting and tone policing. I was just going to downvote and flag your comment and move on, but I think you offered some valuable information about the policy and I'd like to hear more without the divisive parts that add less value.
> Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia.
However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.
> Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
I have no idea. It certainly seems insanely careless to me to defund something like this but I haven't found anything in my brief research that gives me an idea of the impact. Intuitively I'd expect that to show up in the data a little later (assuming that data is still being collected)
The border didn't magically eradicate the flies on one side. Pushing the border down to the Darien Gap took work, but we did it before and can do it again. The real problem is the gleeful destruction of government capacity to do things like this.
You get that there was a president between 2020 and now, right? Nobody is sticking up for Trump; they're just saying, this particular bad thing isn't a DOGE outcome.
They cut funding in March in the middle of it beginning to spread north, and the spread has continued uncontrolled in the months since then.
The DOGE cuts directly worsened the current situation. It’s unclear if the initial covid era cuts were performed by Biden or Trump (I can’t find a date or primary source for those).
I don't know about "not a thing"; have to be careful about overcorrecting the other direction. The thing I'm wary about is just shutting down discussion of complicated things as soon as Trump appears. The screwworm situation is interesting!
The first sign of spread past panama was seen in Nov 2024. Parasites can spread fast and the US/Mexico needed to react fast to the fact that it spread past panama.
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
An article I read mentioned that Nov '24 is when the flies were spotted in Mexico. I incorrectly assumed that meant that is when they breached the panama boarder.
So I agree with the commenter that falsified my claim because they are correct, the date of breach was earlier and the time to react was then.
And the Panama border (Darien Gap, specifically) used to be a stronger natural barrier; humans have been crossing it for years, are starting to graze cows within the exclusion zone, etc.
Musk certainly shares responsibility, but focusing responsibility on him lets others escape blame - eg Trump, Congress, the corpo and individual edgelord enablers sanguine about chaos, etc.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, he could have actually done something politically on his own, and yet he still ends up being used as a useful idiot scapegoat by a con artist. "But Trump promised he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
The key to managing this pest [edit: after it breaches the isthmus program] is through active monitoring, treating infested wounds as well as conducting castration and dehorning in less active months. It’s not like cattle herds didn’t exist prior to the 1950s.
That’s how we manage them now. I mean before we had that program, we dealt with the pest/infestation that way and we can in the future too if need be to combat what’s getting through. Obviously neutralizing them down in the isthmus is preferred but we’re seeing them come up from Mexico now. So if you have a minor infestation that’s how you treat it to address whatever gets missed by the sterilization program.
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to the pest.
The US successfully eradicated screwworms here in 1966 with a brilliant integrated sterile insect technique - I think the very first use of it (and had previously funded helping other countries control it also). But if we had another outbreak spread, I doubt there's any shred of competence left in this current gutted federal government to do anything like that again. Maybe they can have the new ICE folks try to deport the screwworm flies.
Whether your meat comes form South America or the US or the EU, always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face. There are thousands of types of dangerous larvae that can infect via the eyes rubbing the eyes or the nose picking ones nose when handling raw meats and vegetables. Cutting meat slices thinner and cooking them well kills larvae. Marinating meats with something that contains acetic acid also helps. Stomach acid takes care of the rest.
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
I have had lots of discussions with people who insist in eating all raw. I have been in a restaurant where a teenager ordered a raw beef right beaid us. Made me sick just of seeing, feeling the raw meat smell, and hearing the chewing.
I have seen enough “chefs” handling raw meat in tv, putting it literally seconds in heat, and basically eating raw. There is no agenda, but I do see a trend.
I thought not eating raw meat was more of an US thing, here in Europe/Germany there are some dishes that consists of raw meat, and that doesn't mean heated for seconds. Guess that's why we also have stricter hygiene rules.
'tartare' you see in corporate canteen (and a lot of restaurants sadly) are from Metro, and are absolutely safe: after being cut, it's flash-freezed in its can, and the can is only opened seconds before the meat is prepared, minutes before being served.
>> always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face.
Ecoli alone should be enough to be careful with handling raw meats (of any animal) and of course the worms and other things. Specially if you have ANY wounds, small as they are, if e.g. lemon juice burns, is an open wound.
Also meat should be cooked properly. Lately seems to be kind of hype, almost a competition, who eats the rawer meat. 5 star chefs are pushing more and more red, even I have seen “chefs” simply literally laying meat for 5 seconds. The texture is gummy, taste horrible, and just dangerous.
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.
This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.
Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
I highly doubt big pharma will intervene. Humans only care about the foreseeable future. Our interest and actions regarding climate change shows that openly to each and everyone of us.
Big pharma will intervene when they realize that life is one big chemistry experiment, and it's running longer than any lab has. AI to predict, nature to produce, then you need to figure out how nature produced. Understanding the pathways in nature -> quicker time to product.
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
USAID was in charge of the program which monitored screwworm spread in central and south america. The way you combat screwworm is by releasing sterile male flies in screwworm outbreak areas.
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
I appreciate you citing the USAID funding but you seem to be trying to prove a point rather than get to the truth. Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown, USDA is actively working on it, one can see this by going to usda.gov and searching for "screwworm". I really appreciate ajmurmann's edit which acknowledges this.
> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"
Coming from a family that has cattle and dairy cows in south eastern Brazil, where screwworm is endemic, I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US. After some research it appears it affects more climates that are always hot and humid, and big operations where the animals are not being checked frequently. Also the handling at the 60s was probably much worse than modern techniques for avoiding animals being hurt and treating when they are infected.
So with pests and viruses there is no real eradication? Do they really require an unceasing war to reign them in? I have no knowledge of this field - just curious.
Screwworms could probably be eradicated in theory but it would require spreading the sterile fly program to the entirety of the Americas which isn't going to happen. There would always be a pocket somewhere in the Amazon of fertile flies so it isn't really viable. The point of stopping them at the Darien Gap was that there was a geographically small area where their spread could be halted from entering Central and North America and re-establishing themselves.
It depends on the pest. Some of them are easier to eliminate than others. With screwworm flies the only offense we have is to raise them by the billions, sterilize them with radiation, chill them down, and then drop them out of airplanes. Fertile females end up mating with sterile males and then cannot lay any eggs before they die. Each generation then becomes radically smaller than the previous. Since their lifecycle is only a few weeks long this eliminates them in a few months. They were able to successfully eradicate the screwworm fly from North and Central America, but a combination of expense and diplomatic entanglements prevented them from continuing south past Panama. There have been outbreaks before, most notably in Egypt (or maybe just northern Africa, I forget) a few decades ago.
We have different responses to other pests. For example, Florida maintains a mosquito control program that sprays vast swathes of the state with insecticide from both the ground and the air every 7 days. I imagine that other southern states do as well.
Rinderpest (a cattle disease) and Smallpox are the only two diseases ever successfully eradicated. The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine ever invented and it took until 1980, about 180 years later, to eradicate the disease entirely. It pretty much is an unceasing war, though Guinea worm and polio are also relatively close to being eradicated. But if you stop fighting them, they'll just spread again.
Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
See I guess I find broadside “impractical” dissatisfying.
Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.
Yes, the USDA-APHIS Screwworm Barrier Maintenance Program had its funding reduced by 30% in the 2024 budget, which significantly impacted sterile fly production capacity at the Panama facility.
> This is maintained with stringent animal movement controls, surveillance, trapping, and following the proven science to push the NWS barrier south in phases as quickly as possible.
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
(Implied) invalid generalization, or confirmation bias. This is a good reason to not eat that particular meat. In general, however, meat is an S-tier source of nutrition, vitamins, and minerals.
What a weird question, if it was at all genuine. Not only is it not inefficient but, e.g., cows are absolutely unique and amazing for their ability to digest, e.g., grass into something that is highly nutritiously desirable for humans.
Asserting ruminants are “irrelevant” tells me nobody should take you seriously on this topic. Replicating their function is the problem to solve if you ever want to make the case you think you are making.
Meat especially grass fed beef, is not just protein, it's an incredibly dense source of nutritients. You have to eat far higher quantities and ranges of plant based alternatives to acquire the same nutritional value, and they are usually less bioavailable. So from the perspective of the person consuming it, it's very efficient source of nutrients, and also the most satiating food you can eat, so you won't feel the urge to overeat.
Abstractly, using land for crops is around an order of magnitude more efficient when considering only calories per unit area, but when considering the total system i.e the humans consuming it, there's an argument to be had that more livestock could be more efficient when considering all the side effects of a huge population of malnourished humans overeating refined hyper-paletable carbs.
For either side of this argument, the real issue is industrial agriculture producing both crops and livestock in unsustainable and nutritionally devoid ways, that are incredibly bad for the environment and humans consuming it.
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
As a non-meat eater I've gotten used to how riled up and defensive people get over the mere suggestion that eating meat in today's industrialized society comes at an ecological and economic cost that we can't afford in the long run. I find much better luck engaging people by suggesting reduced consumption of meat vs. total abstinence.
Lovely platitudes but "nature" stops being abstract once it is happening to you, we are talking about mammals being eaten alive here, so that could be you, your family, your pets, cattle...etc. Of course people are going to react to that.
Of course rape is natural. Orangutans, ducks, geese, and certain dolphin species also rape. That's a problem if you think "natural" justifies human behavior, but why would it?
Eating, fundamentally, reduces some other organism's population. All of nature does it.
We consume life and the byproducts of life. Even the high energy gas exchange we rely upon is 100% a waste product that we consume.
Life is fundamentally about consuming and repurposing the materials of others.
You don't need to have sex. You need to eat to survive.
Our bodies are naturally adapted to consume wildlife. It is the most natural state for our body plan and biochemistry.
Our body cannot make all of the amino acids and metabolites it needs to be healthy. If technology and food fortification vanished one day, we would be forced to eat meat to survive. Non-meat diets are only enabled by technology. Without it, we would not even be having this discussion.
You could also say we evolved to lie but nowadays it’s considered a bad habit.
The crucial point is the morals of society.
Being has was once a sin, now nit so much at least in the western world even if some try to turn that back.
We also evolved to kill especially with weapons because our natural one aren’t that great. We kill lots of other humans, of course the evil one is always the other side because killing is bad nevertheless we evolved to do quite effectively.
It‘s not eat : rape, it‘s eat: fuck, so for some the equivalent for rape is eating meat or more specific killing animal : rape.
We evolved to eat and we evolved to fuck.
But like sex doesn’t mean rape so does eating not necessarily mean meat or at least no much and not without consideration who the animal is raised before we kill and eat it.
A long time in many societies we didn’t really care what women felt during sex or if they were even willing to.
But we evolved further and learned women have the same rights as men and rape is a bad thing. We even redefined what is considered rape. It’s not that long ago that raping your wife was impossible from a legal point of view.
We also changed our view on factorial farming, at least many of us. At least we want meat from a happy cow that lived on the pasture and not penned up in the barn without sunshine. The next step isn’t that far, no animal should be killed if nutrition is possible otherwise. We already spare some animals as food. In the west it’s cats and dogs, in India cows. And some include all animals in the don‘t eat category.
Any other predictions you saw/see coming? I feel like it would be useful to collect all of the predictions from people with domain knowledge and then build a website to track them all. Whether or not they happen, who knows, but being able to track them should be a big help in building a narrative of what is really happening vs media narratives that are hyper localized in time and often do a terrible job of explaining the long history of events.
This predates the DOGE cuts. During COVID and afterwards smuggling of cattle across from South America into Central America basically went full tilt and is considered the reason why the program collapsed.
The barrier failure happened last year due to covid related supply chain issues that eventually reached the end of the bullwhip and was announced then.
A story from 2020 about how effective the US funded anti-screwworm program used to be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/3sD9d
Why is it "used to be"? I've heard about the program before and thought it was incredible. What happened to it?
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
Funding was recently cut but this infestation has been building for years. The key failure that caused this current outbreak was during COVID. The lockdowns shut down both the release flights by the US and the mosquito breeding facilities in Latina America, grinding the whole pest control program to a halt.
From the other link on the front page about this subject [1]:
> Illegal cattle smuggling, long considered one of the most efficient money-laundering routes for the drug cartels which terrorised San Pedro Sula, is regarded as the main reason for the accelerating advance. Up to 800,000 cattle a year are illicitly raised in nature reserves, such as the UNESCO-protected Rio Platano Biosphere in Honduras, and then smuggled by boat and truck up to Mexico. The flies, of course, travel with the livestock, embedded in cattle hides, accelerating their advance.
> “Everything indicates that illegal cattle routes from Central America are the arteries through which the screw worm is circulating again toward Mexico,” wrote Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerican and the Western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a recent paper.
So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics. Meanwhile, I had no idea that cattle smuggling was a money-laundering route for drug cartels. TIL!
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
I follow your intended meaning (USAID & etc cuts). But taken literally it's US policies and propaganda that enable the drug cartels. Our dysfunctions are still ultimately the root of the problem.
OK, so let me be even more explicit: for those who continue to want to connect this to recent changes in the US political system, the relationship is tenuous, at best.
The world is complex and interdependent. The US, being a powerful and influential country, has direct or indirect involvement in pretty much everything. That doesn't mean we are to blame for everything.
I agree. We certainly aren't at fault for the existence of organized crime in general. However our aggressively exported drug policy is very obviously the root that props up the Mexican and South American drug cartels (among others). There's decades of academic literature and economic analysis on this point.
When a parasite is spreading due to a large scale money laundering tactic by a large scale criminal enterprise whose scale is only enabled by our policy I class that as yet another own goal of the war on drugs.
These downstream effects are somewhat non obvious so I think it's worthwhile to point them out when they come up.
Good thing we are considering approving military force against the cartels. Optimally those large scale criminal enterprises will soon find themselves to be of much smaller scale after we start drone striking them. The cartels are already being hurt by the increased security along our southern borders as well as the large crackdown from Mexican authorities as they seek to appease Trump.
Incredible that we could have been doing this the whole time, we just chose not to. We just chose to allow the cartels to act in whatever way they saw fit and to cross our border with their poison and violence whenever they wanted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/world/americas/mexico-car...
Are you concerned about the possibility that the cartels can strike back with their own drones?
If they do so, what do you feel should be the correct response?
Absolute overwhelming force where what happened serves as a cautionary tale for generations
Is there a problem America can't solve with guns?
I mean taken to its furthest extreme, not really.
America owes its dominance to two things: Guns and Money
And the second is very much dependent on the first.
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
Right now, as the world turns, we have the greatest number of appointees in positions of governmental influence on policies, that have no idea what they are doing because of a lack of expertise. Almost all these vital positions are politically appointed by the current administration. Need an example: soon the policies of JFK jr., God help us, are going to, unfortunately, prove my point.
Yeah, the way we’re turning our backs on one of the most important medical miracles in recent years is horrifying. I hope COVID or something worse doesn’t cause too much carnage.
Someone must have decided they weren't "essential". Big mistake.
Twice
Not essential. We can eat less beef. Better for health, the environment.
Screwworm also infects wildlife and occasionally humans, it's really not something you want to have in the area if you can help it
It sounds like it's more than occasionally infecting humans: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
And we should encourage that by leveraging the response to a natural disaster to advance your particular policy goals?
While I am a vegetarian and thus am an existence proof, there's multiple different ways in which something can be "essential".
Anyone going "let's stop a thing today which will messes with a non-trivial fraction of our food production in a few years' time, without preparing either that food sector nor the dietary choices of the consumers before that happens" is definitely making a high-risk strategic choice.
Already happening. Beef is rapidly becomming unaffordable. A steak at the supermarket is >$20. Can't imagine what they cost at a restaurant. I've switched to mostly turkey, chicken, and pork.
Maybe for a USDA Prime ribeye or tenderloin at Bristol Farms or something.
If you go to an ethnic store like Arabic halaal markets, ribeye steaks can be had for less than $10 a pound (but they’re ungraded). In one of the highest CoL areas in Southern California. Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are $20/pound and ribeye rounds are $25/pound.
That's due to issues around monopolization in the Dairy and Cattle industry in the US [1].
70% of all processors in the dairy and cattle industry are now owned by 3 companies. Processors don't own cattle - they just process raw material like dairy and meat into cheese and pasteurized milk and handle the entire supply chain. But because they control the supply chain, distribution, and even the feed [0] used they can set rates and vendors used by farmers.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
[0] - https://www.landolakesinc.com/what-we-do/animal-nutrition/
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
___________
To u/andrew_lettuce below:
Canada has the exact same issue of processor consolidation and oligopoly in agriculture as the US [0][1][2]
Arguably, it's worse than the US because this process started in the 1990s in Canada [3] versus the 2010s in the US.
[0] - https://ca.rbcwealthmanagement.com/terrence-galarneau/blog/4...
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7350140/
[2] - https://financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/why-only-t...
[3] - https://www.eap.mcgill.ca/MagRack/RH/RH_E_97_05.htm
This isn't true in Canada and we're seeing as big of price increases for beef, greater than the US for ground beef. This is a supply issue while demand has increased. Drought and costs have also impacted herd size
Packer and ag consolidation is a huge problem, but the underlying issue here is climate change and long-lasting droughts; some of the issues with herd size — the smallest since about 1950 — come from COVID hangover when cows weren’t getting processed and price-per-head plummeted, but the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed. We’re looking at long-term cost trends that are unlikely to reverse or even be significantly ameliorated anytime soon.
> the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed
Ranchers that can support large herds (2,000+) are those who earn a net profit [0] and are consolidating because processors do not want to support small farms.
While environmental factors do play a role, saying it's the primary reason is greenwashing of the real oligopolies tendencies arising in American Ag industry.
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
Is this supported by the data? During the pandemic people were also blaming "monopolization" or "consolidation" for the rise in grocery prices, but in reality the margins of publicly traded supermarket companies went up by a percentage point or two.
Profit margin increasing by a percentage point on a low margin business is potentially significant
It's certainly meaningful for the company involved, but a 1% increase in grocer margins means a $100 grocery bill becomes $101. It's at best an incomplete explanation for the ~20% price increase on grocery prices between 2021 and 2023.
Yep. To quote The Bullvine [0] (Axios for the cattle and dairy industry):
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
Also [1]
-----------
The fact that a country like India can support 228 milk cooperatives each generating around $500M-2B in revenue and outcompete American dairy+cattle in production and even reducing environmental impact with marginal subsidizes [2] means distribution+processing consolidation and it's side effects (cattle monoculture, non-competitive prices given to farmers, dairy processers NOW becoming animal feed manufacturers) are a good example of market failures due to oligopolic control.
No one at the WI and MI state Dem level is chatting about this based on some of my own meeting with them recently. This is the kind of swing vote topic that can flip all 3 branches of government in 26 and 28.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the opportunity this provides. 84% of Americans consume dairy and dairy products [3] - this is an easy win if some sympathy was provided.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/dairys-great-cons...
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
[2] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...
[3] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
Market failures due to oligarchic control is the natural end state of capitalism. Everything is going as intended, the point of the system is to produce oligarchs, not efficient markets.
Not necessarily.
It is mainstream economic and political opinion to regulate in some manner to reduce market consolidation since the 1940s with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index.
I think necessarily. I don’t think it’s possible to devise a capitalist system that doesn’t devolve into oligarchic control. Markets can’t be regulated like the theory wants, because capitalists just use their wealth to take over the politicians. They are able to do this because they control so much wealth. To prevent this hack, you’d have to take control of capital away from the capitalists, thus defeating the core idea of capitalism.
> "capital away from the capitalists"
or find other ways to reduce the influence of money on public elections -- see eg Prof. Lessig (of "Creative Commons" fame) and his writings on "Fix Congress First" which led to Rootstrikers.org
Lina Khan was in power for years and didn't do anything about this.
Closest thing was a case where she blocked Sanderson Farms from being acquired but that was poultry.
She was starting to concentrate on the Ag consolidation [0] but my interpretation is she targeted tech first due to the industry's somewhat weaker political position in both admins.
She also didn't touch Comcast - and they are the kingmakers in PA and DE.
[0] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/katzmann-lecture-lina-khan-talk...
Yes going after tech is the populist thing to do and she did that.
As usual Comcast never gets touched and farm owners might as well write the laws themselves.
By "data" I was referring to data to support the claim that consolidation led to increase in prices (eg. margin expansion), not that consolidation was happening at all. It's the same with supermarkets. There's no doubt that consolidation was happening, and there's even evidence that it led to higher prices, but the absolute effect on grocery bills seems to be marginal.
Im still getting outer skirt for $8 a pound at my grocery. Seems pretty affordable to me
I get great cuts of steak for less than $10 all the time.
At a supermarket? Or local butcher/processor?
Weavers way coop in mt airy Philadelphia.
Doesn't this impact wildlife as well? Apparently the Florida Key Deer was threatened by this a decade ago: https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2017-01-15/screwworm-infesta...
Screwworms will also infect humans, with horrific and potentially fatal consequences.
> Better for health, the environment.
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors [1] which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 228 local run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players each generating around $500M-2B in revenue.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the value this train of thought can have in 2026 and 2028.
84% of Americans consume dairy or dairy alternative (still synthesized using dairy) products [2] - don't make this yet another culture war topic
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
[2] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
Could I start a processor today and disrupt them? (Real question, I know almost noting and meat processing)
>India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle
That's a tad misleading. The statistics I could find only says that India outproduces the US in dairy, not beef. Rounding
>yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0]
I did a cursory search in your source for "carbon" and "methane" and couldn't find anything to back this claim, only vague claims about how India does "Regenerative farming" and is therefore "low methane".
>because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
That's not scalable and only works because the country is poor and beef/dairy consumption isn't high. There's no way you can supply American level demand for beef/dairy by only using crop residue.
>American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
You can easily tell an opposite story about how consolidate companies have bigger budgets for R&D and capital projects, as opposed to 26 cooperatives each trying to implement some sort of strategy.
Regardless, it's terrible to have around you. Your dog will have it too if let be. they do need to be controlled if it gets out of hand. Better now than when its a bigger problem.
Screwworms will eat people too, if allowed to. You really don’t want them in your area.
I guess nature is “finding a way” after all…
125lb take
>"Not essential. We can eat less beef. Better for health, the environment."
We can also live in a cave, better for the environment.
Or just dissapear (which btw, no joking, is what some people propose)
Funny, you don't seem to have beef with the worm eating beef
But it can and does infect humans and other animals
They didn't say they had beef with anyone eating beef.
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The funding was never cut. That was misinfo spread by morons because there was a typical Trump dispute of "mexico will pay for it". But the reality was that was in talks of a Mexico specific coverage program. The Panama program was never touched and is run by a third party agency with stakes holders consisting of the USDA and Panama government.
But yes the current outbreak built up since COVID.
So funding was never cut, but actually some subset did experience cuts? Which is it?
We're taking about Mexico to US trade here so the Mexico specific subprogram seems directly relevant.
Question, are they morons? Is your disagreement with them really that simple? Was it necessary to call them that? I don't like posting this comment, because it will be distracting and tone policing. I was just going to downvote and flag your comment and move on, but I think you offered some valuable information about the policy and I'd like to hear more without the divisive parts that add less value.
> Why is it "used to be"?
> Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia.
However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/texas-prepares-for-wa...
Considering the widths of Panama and Mexico, holding them south of Panama had to be much cheaper.
Yeah, it got cut back in March.
https://kbhbradio.com/usda-cuts-budget-staff-for-animal-dise...
Part of it was restored a couple of months later.
The flies didn't JUST start moving north this year.
Which makes cutting funding for the program that much stupider, no?
[dead]
Smuggling's also a contributing factor, at least in Honduras: https://www.drovers.com/news/industry/surprising-link-betwee...
> Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
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I have no idea. It certainly seems insanely careless to me to defund something like this but I haven't found anything in my brief research that gives me an idea of the impact. Intuitively I'd expect that to show up in the data a little later (assuming that data is still being collected)
DOGE. It was ran by USAID.
It was failing long before this. The border used to be down by Panama.
The border didn't magically eradicate the flies on one side. Pushing the border down to the Darien Gap took work, but we did it before and can do it again. The real problem is the gleeful destruction of government capacity to do things like this.
Yes, that's true, but the point the parent commenter was making is that recent previous administrations also didn't take this problem seriously.
Who was president in 2020 again?
I see you are bias-free.
You get that there was a president between 2020 and now, right? Nobody is sticking up for Trump; they're just saying, this particular bad thing isn't a DOGE outcome.
If this particular bad thing was bad before DOGE, then it’s far worse under DOGE. It’s a particularly ridiculous argument.
Knowing how and why a thing happened, is far more important than political grandstanding.
The doge cuts may affect the future of this program, but have absolutely positively nothing to do with the situation now. Nothing. Not a thing.
It is fine to say doge will make this neglect worse, but the neglect happened for a decade.
And that's important. That's vital to understanding why, and how it happened.
And that is absolutely not a ridiculous concept.
They cut funding in March in the middle of it beginning to spread north, and the spread has continued uncontrolled in the months since then.
The DOGE cuts directly worsened the current situation. It’s unclear if the initial covid era cuts were performed by Biden or Trump (I can’t find a date or primary source for those).
I don't know about "not a thing"; have to be careful about overcorrecting the other direction. The thing I'm wary about is just shutting down discussion of complicated things as soon as Trump appears. The screwworm situation is interesting!
The first sign of spread past panama was seen in Nov 2024. Parasites can spread fast and the US/Mexico needed to react fast to the fact that it spread past panama.
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
It wasn't a critical time, it was late.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
Fair point.
The cost to fight this back will definitely exponentially increase.
Ok, but where did you get that Nov '24 date from? You just agreed with a comment that falsified that claim.
An article I read mentioned that Nov '24 is when the flies were spotted in Mexico. I incorrectly assumed that meant that is when they breached the panama boarder.
So I agree with the commenter that falsified my claim because they are correct, the date of breach was earlier and the time to react was then.
Gotcha. Thanks! I was just curious.
Late is still a critical time...perhaps more critical.
And the Panama border (Darien Gap, specifically) used to be a stronger natural barrier; humans have been crossing it for years, are starting to graze cows within the exclusion zone, etc.
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Musk certainly shares responsibility, but focusing responsibility on him lets others escape blame - eg Trump, Congress, the corpo and individual edgelord enablers sanguine about chaos, etc.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, he could have actually done something politically on his own, and yet he still ends up being used as a useful idiot scapegoat by a con artist. "But Trump promised he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
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Great (gross) video from the Department of Energy (1960) on how the screwworm was defeated: https://youtu.be/QFoOnS6CWSI
I'd never head of screwworm before, turns out it's not a worm, this page is pretty decent: https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
> Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue.
What assholes. :(
Yeah the switch on these guys was definitely flipped to ‘evil’
The key to managing this pest [edit: after it breaches the isthmus program] is through active monitoring, treating infested wounds as well as conducting castration and dehorning in less active months. It’s not like cattle herds didn’t exist prior to the 1950s.
That's in fact not how screwworms are managed; the "border" of screwworm prevalence was managed by spreading sterilized male screwworms.
That’s how we manage them now. I mean before we had that program, we dealt with the pest/infestation that way and we can in the future too if need be to combat what’s getting through. Obviously neutralizing them down in the isthmus is preferred but we’re seeing them come up from Mexico now. So if you have a minor infestation that’s how you treat it to address whatever gets missed by the sterilization program.
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to the pest.
The whole reason this is newsworthy is that the system we had prior to eradication was not good.
Yes, obviously; but it’s not the end of the cattle industry as some make it out to be.
To clarify: it was never eradicated. It’s been actively managed and kept at bay. Now it’s punching through some holes.
Because we stopped doing the thing that works. Your earlier point, that we can just as easily return to herd management strategies, was wrong.
What did we stop doing? The sterilization program is ongoing.
There are always periodic outbreaks in Central America and Mexico. The current one started in 2023.
One common vector is illegal cattle trafficking.
The US successfully eradicated screwworms here in 1966 with a brilliant integrated sterile insect technique - I think the very first use of it (and had previously funded helping other countries control it also). But if we had another outbreak spread, I doubt there's any shred of competence left in this current gutted federal government to do anything like that again. Maybe they can have the new ICE folks try to deport the screwworm flies.
They announced funding to do it again, back in June. But I have no idea if there's anyone around to pay.
Lead times are asymmetric.
The current plan was announced here a few weeks ago: https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/06/...
Whether your meat comes form South America or the US or the EU, always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face. There are thousands of types of dangerous larvae that can infect via the eyes rubbing the eyes or the nose picking ones nose when handling raw meats and vegetables. Cutting meat slices thinner and cooking them well kills larvae. Marinating meats with something that contains acetic acid also helps. Stomach acid takes care of the rest.
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
> I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
Food safety with raw meets isn’t really going against the agenda.
What's with everyone saying they know some secret that everyone else is trying to suppress?
Is it just that we all spend time in our bubble and take that to other groups?
I don't even know what agenda he's going against by saying one should be careful around raw meat. Who's on the other side of this?
I have had lots of discussions with people who insist in eating all raw. I have been in a restaurant where a teenager ordered a raw beef right beaid us. Made me sick just of seeing, feeling the raw meat smell, and hearing the chewing. I have seen enough “chefs” handling raw meat in tv, putting it literally seconds in heat, and basically eating raw. There is no agenda, but I do see a trend.
I thought not eating raw meat was more of an US thing, here in Europe/Germany there are some dishes that consists of raw meat, and that doesn't mean heated for seconds. Guess that's why we also have stricter hygiene rules.
The french steak tartare is very common in France, in many corporate canteen.
'tartare' you see in corporate canteen (and a lot of restaurants sadly) are from Metro, and are absolutely safe: after being cut, it's flash-freezed in its can, and the can is only opened seconds before the meat is prepared, minutes before being served.
They're not really good, but they're safe.
The shock of it is gamed for TikTok and Reels virality
He's so effectively standing alone that nobody dare stand against him.
>> always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face.
Ecoli alone should be enough to be careful with handling raw meats (of any animal) and of course the worms and other things. Specially if you have ANY wounds, small as they are, if e.g. lemon juice burns, is an open wound.
Also meat should be cooked properly. Lately seems to be kind of hype, almost a competition, who eats the rawer meat. 5 star chefs are pushing more and more red, even I have seen “chefs” simply literally laying meat for 5 seconds. The texture is gummy, taste horrible, and just dangerous.
That won't help your costumers that eat the raw meat you prepared, you still need to have proper hygiene in the complete food chain.
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.
This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.
Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
I highly doubt big pharma will intervene. Humans only care about the foreseeable future. Our interest and actions regarding climate change shows that openly to each and everyone of us.
Big pharma will intervene when they realize that life is one big chemistry experiment, and it's running longer than any lab has. AI to predict, nature to produce, then you need to figure out how nature produced. Understanding the pathways in nature -> quicker time to product.
In what is it “asynchronous”?
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
I'm sure they meant asymmetrical
USAID was in charge of the program which monitored screwworm spread in central and south america. The way you combat screwworm is by releasing sterile male flies in screwworm outbreak areas.
Do you have a source? Because this appears to be false. I can't find anything indicating it was funded by USAID.
Everything I'm reading says it has been funded by USDA, and in fact funding has been significantly increased during 2025.
https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
I appreciate you citing the USAID funding but you seem to be trying to prove a point rather than get to the truth. Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown, USDA is actively working on it, one can see this by going to usda.gov and searching for "screwworm". I really appreciate ajmurmann's edit which acknowledges this.
https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...
> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"
This was downvoted because...?
I don't see why a trade group of affected industries can't collectively fund this
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A recent, relevant video from Kurzgesagt: How Nuclear Flies Protect You from Flesh-Eating Parasites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxq60I5RSW8
I was wondering where i heard the term screwworm before!
Coming from a family that has cattle and dairy cows in south eastern Brazil, where screwworm is endemic, I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US. After some research it appears it affects more climates that are always hot and humid, and big operations where the animals are not being checked frequently. Also the handling at the 60s was probably much worse than modern techniques for avoiding animals being hurt and treating when they are infected.
> I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US.
It’s not a huge problem in the US. We eradicated screwworm in the 60s.
We are trying very hard to keep it out. The US normally works very hard to monitor and prevent these situations in trade partners.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flesh-eating-scre...
Was. Was in the U.S.
Was is past tense, indicating a historical problem, not a current one.
One more thing where we're going back in time. Sure seems like a new decline and fall is coming bit by bit.
Feels like we had the cure in our hands and just let the disease walk back in.
The “cure” is an unceasing war. Then COVID hit and the war ceased for a few months.
So with pests and viruses there is no real eradication? Do they really require an unceasing war to reign them in? I have no knowledge of this field - just curious.
Screwworms could probably be eradicated in theory but it would require spreading the sterile fly program to the entirety of the Americas which isn't going to happen. There would always be a pocket somewhere in the Amazon of fertile flies so it isn't really viable. The point of stopping them at the Darien Gap was that there was a geographically small area where their spread could be halted from entering Central and North America and re-establishing themselves.
It depends on the pest. Some of them are easier to eliminate than others. With screwworm flies the only offense we have is to raise them by the billions, sterilize them with radiation, chill them down, and then drop them out of airplanes. Fertile females end up mating with sterile males and then cannot lay any eggs before they die. Each generation then becomes radically smaller than the previous. Since their lifecycle is only a few weeks long this eliminates them in a few months. They were able to successfully eradicate the screwworm fly from North and Central America, but a combination of expense and diplomatic entanglements prevented them from continuing south past Panama. There have been outbreaks before, most notably in Egypt (or maybe just northern Africa, I forget) a few decades ago.
We have different responses to other pests. For example, Florida maintains a mosquito control program that sprays vast swathes of the state with insecticide from both the ground and the air every 7 days. I imagine that other southern states do as well.
Rinderpest (a cattle disease) and Smallpox are the only two diseases ever successfully eradicated. The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine ever invented and it took until 1980, about 180 years later, to eradicate the disease entirely. It pretty much is an unceasing war, though Guinea worm and polio are also relatively close to being eradicated. But if you stop fighting them, they'll just spread again.
Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
The durable reservoirs are in South America, not Central America. We actually eradicated it (at least essentially) all the way down to the Darien Gap.
See I guess I find broadside “impractical” dissatisfying.
Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.
Didn't they pull funding for mitigation programs regarding this? Or was that rescinded?
Yes, the USDA-APHIS Screwworm Barrier Maintenance Program had its funding reduced by 30% in the 2024 budget, which significantly impacted sterile fly production capacity at the Panama facility.
citation?
USDA approved an emergency funding of 165 million in 2024 for this issue
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/agency-announcements/usda-ap...
If he says the budget was reduced, isn't the citation already made?
Government budgets are usually public. Do you want a secondary source, like a news article?
The claims aren't exclusive.
With this and the tariffs on Brazil the US consumer is going to feel it.
‘Man-eating’ screw worm turns hospital into horror show https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Mexican Livestock halted while US is in trade war with Brazil (21 percent of all US beef imports).
July 9th? Wrong date or is this a month old?
> This is maintained with stringent animal movement controls, surveillance, trapping, and following the proven science to push the NWS barrier south in phases as quickly as possible.
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
> Why add "proven" before science?
I'm pretty sure it's a political thing, and is meant to be read as "don't worry, we aren't using any problematic science like mRNA vaccines".
I think mr Trump will have to seriously rethink the 50% tariff he put on our (Brazilian) meat imports then. Interesting.
Yeah, cause you guys don't have screw worms in Brazil? It's likely the screw worms in Mexico now came from Brazil.
Here's a video describing the system that fell apart which had been working for a long time to keep these flies out of north america
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
America put a large tariff on Australian beef. We don’t have this.
Guess you all like eating expensive beef.
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Well, if destroying things that have only positive outcomes for your constituents is not dysfunction then what is?
It's not dysfunction if the function was to harm other people. If there happens to be a bit of blowback, well, I'm sure it was worth it.
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(Implied) invalid generalization, or confirmation bias. This is a good reason to not eat that particular meat. In general, however, meat is an S-tier source of nutrition, vitamins, and minerals.
How can something which is horribly inefficient for environment (water use, land use, greenhouse emissions from fertilizer) possibly be S tier?
What a weird question, if it was at all genuine. Not only is it not inefficient but, e.g., cows are absolutely unique and amazing for their ability to digest, e.g., grass into something that is highly nutritiously desirable for humans.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
What you say is maybe true but irrelevant. We don't have to grow grass.
Asserting ruminants are “irrelevant” tells me nobody should take you seriously on this topic. Replicating their function is the problem to solve if you ever want to make the case you think you are making.
Crappy grass is the only thing that grows in the upper plains because there isnt any water.
Meat especially grass fed beef, is not just protein, it's an incredibly dense source of nutritients. You have to eat far higher quantities and ranges of plant based alternatives to acquire the same nutritional value, and they are usually less bioavailable. So from the perspective of the person consuming it, it's very efficient source of nutrients, and also the most satiating food you can eat, so you won't feel the urge to overeat.
Abstractly, using land for crops is around an order of magnitude more efficient when considering only calories per unit area, but when considering the total system i.e the humans consuming it, there's an argument to be had that more livestock could be more efficient when considering all the side effects of a huge population of malnourished humans overeating refined hyper-paletable carbs.
For either side of this argument, the real issue is industrial agriculture producing both crops and livestock in unsustainable and nutritionally devoid ways, that are incredibly bad for the environment and humans consuming it.
Because that's not what we are talking about.
Biodiverse farms with animals and plants, rotating crop fields, are far more ecologically friendly than pure plant farms.
Food that eats food isn't ever gonna be good thermodynamics.
Calories isn't the only thing that's needed from food.
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You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously in many different threads. If you keep this up, we're going to ban you.
I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but we badly need you to fix this. We've already asked you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751806).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Don't worry about it. We'll all be allergic to meat eventually thanks to that tick.
Plenty of pests affect crops too.
(Blue dot in hill country TX here.)
Yep. I hear that.
<saturday-soap-box>
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
</saturday-soap-box>
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As a non-meat eater I've gotten used to how riled up and defensive people get over the mere suggestion that eating meat in today's industrialized society comes at an ecological and economic cost that we can't afford in the long run. I find much better luck engaging people by suggesting reduced consumption of meat vs. total abstinence.
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Laws and regulation didn’t evolve from mother nature, so we should start killing each other because it’s natural?
Or it’s only natural when a non-human species is killed off by another species?
> edit: I'm not going to respond to each individual reply calling me a fascist or relating eating to rape or slavery
You should not reply to any of them, but just flag them, honestly.
Lovely platitudes but "nature" stops being abstract once it is happening to you, we are talking about mammals being eaten alive here, so that could be you, your family, your pets, cattle...etc. Of course people are going to react to that.
Yes? Horrific things don't stop being horrific, just because they're the status quo. (But this is wildly off-topic.)
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By that logic you could argue rape is just nature too.
At some point mankind added moral.
Of course rape is natural. Orangutans, ducks, geese, and certain dolphin species also rape. That's a problem if you think "natural" justifies human behavior, but why would it?
Read the edit of parent.
And I wrote „just nature“ because parent used it’s nature as a justification. Hence the moral part.
We evolved to eat. We did not evolve to rape.
Eating, fundamentally, reduces some other organism's population. All of nature does it.
We consume life and the byproducts of life. Even the high energy gas exchange we rely upon is 100% a waste product that we consume.
Life is fundamentally about consuming and repurposing the materials of others.
You don't need to have sex. You need to eat to survive.
Our bodies are naturally adapted to consume wildlife. It is the most natural state for our body plan and biochemistry.
Our body cannot make all of the amino acids and metabolites it needs to be healthy. If technology and food fortification vanished one day, we would be forced to eat meat to survive. Non-meat diets are only enabled by technology. Without it, we would not even be having this discussion.
None of that really matters if you just care about nutrition or sentient beings without the story telling.
You could also say we evolved to lie but nowadays it’s considered a bad habit.
The crucial point is the morals of society.
Being has was once a sin, now nit so much at least in the western world even if some try to turn that back.
We also evolved to kill especially with weapons because our natural one aren’t that great. We kill lots of other humans, of course the evil one is always the other side because killing is bad nevertheless we evolved to do quite effectively.
Evolution is a explanation not an justification.
Your word analogy is wrong.
It‘s not eat : rape, it‘s eat: fuck, so for some the equivalent for rape is eating meat or more specific killing animal : rape.
We evolved to eat and we evolved to fuck.
But like sex doesn’t mean rape so does eating not necessarily mean meat or at least no much and not without consideration who the animal is raised before we kill and eat it.
A long time in many societies we didn’t really care what women felt during sex or if they were even willing to.
But we evolved further and learned women have the same rights as men and rape is a bad thing. We even redefined what is considered rape. It’s not that long ago that raping your wife was impossible from a legal point of view.
We also changed our view on factorial farming, at least many of us. At least we want meat from a happy cow that lived on the pasture and not penned up in the barn without sunshine. The next step isn’t that far, no animal should be killed if nutrition is possible otherwise. We already spare some animals as food. In the west it’s cats and dogs, in India cows. And some include all animals in the don‘t eat category.
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Really? All year? In this current political climate?
To be fair, we don’t know what they read this year.
This was literally one of the first North American disasters I saw predicted as falling out of the Doge cuts.
Any other predictions you saw/see coming? I feel like it would be useful to collect all of the predictions from people with domain knowledge and then build a website to track them all. Whether or not they happen, who knows, but being able to track them should be a big help in building a narrative of what is really happening vs media narratives that are hyper localized in time and often do a terrible job of explaining the long history of events.
This predates the DOGE cuts. During COVID and afterwards smuggling of cattle across from South America into Central America basically went full tilt and is considered the reason why the program collapsed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
The barrier failure happened last year due to covid related supply chain issues that eventually reached the end of the bullwhip and was announced then.
I assumed this was a computer virus affecting an exchange based on it being at the top of HN.