Man-eating' screw worm turns hospital into horror show

telegraph.co.uk

45 points·oumua_don17··7 comments

If there hadn’t been any cases of human infection in 30 years, can this really be explained by the cattle smuggling? Feels like something else must have changed too.

They mention cattle illegaly raised in nature reserves. There may have been some surviving population of flies there.

There was a 'barrier' somewhere between Mexico and South America where sterile male flies were regularly released. They outnumbered natives and stopped reproduction cycle. Till recently. Now without control flies spread north into their historical territory. With warming climate they can spread even further.

Wiki has a bit of info on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia_hominivorax

Worms turn into flies which lay eggs in wounds that spawn more worms in a few days. Not great.

Another thing is the the stories in this article. They left me with a horror. Not great.

Hey, I think I've seen that movie.

Technically you could use ivermectin to stave off a screw worm infection in humans but lol that's silly. What kind of quack doctor would ever use HORSE TRANQUILIZER on a human lol. That's for horses not people. We need common sense pharma development of ivermectin-like drugs, but the human form ivermectin not the horse form ivermectin. Same for amoxicillin, my kids aren't going near that stuff, a freaking CAT ANTIBIOTIC, imagine using that on humans

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