Oh good, screwworms are back (2025)
marginallycompelling.com
marginallycompelling.com
But institutional failures like this aren’t just the aggregate failure of a number of irresponsible people, they are a failure of a cultural attitude that doesn’t demand excellence from everyone in order to get the job done.
I'll add though that when crisis happens the entity 'doing something about it' suddenly looks amazing, even if they were the cause. That means that it is a winning political strategy to create a lot of crisis so you can solve a few of them and look like a hero.
How is "They were almost certainly transported via unchecked northward migration of people and animals." a consequence of loss of trust in science?
1. Mistrust in science, and
2. A habit of hastily strangling government watchdog agencies.
#1 has put all such public-safety programs on the chopping block. #2 is the fatal stroke of the axe.
The Right: "Nobody is talking about subject X, where is free speech". -> meanwhile -> "Everyone is talking about subject X", because you always had free speech. It was just a McGuffin to rile up the base and take control so you can suppress others.
No.
First, the problem here predates DOGE by an entire presidential administration or more. If you had read the article, you’d know that the northward migration of flies started at least in 2020.
Second, the thing you’re misremembering has no relation to this program. It was funding for transgenic animals in a completely different area of research.
You are repeating hearsay that sounds like it should be the reason. It confirms your political priors while ironically making you feel smug about your scientific knowledge. I’m not a fan of the current administration, but seeing so many people here bend over backwards to blame this on their political enemies, without even a hint of intellectual curiosity is more depressing than anything the politicians have done. Your political team can be incompetent too — and probably is!
You are making the same error. Other Republicans (if not Trump) indeed criticized government-funded research into the screwworm lifecycle. Denying that the party of the president has been opposed to both science and regulation on principle -- including with this particular crisis -- makes you look naive at best, dishonest at worst.
https://cra.org/govaffairs/blog/2012/04/members-of-congress-...
That sentence might have been stronger if you'd written:
“but seeing so many people here bend over backwards to blame this on my political enemies, without even a hint of intellectual curiosity…”
See sibling threads.
We do have treatments of screwworm infestations, but it involves physically removing the larva and usually removing tissue as well as systemic treatments like antiparasitics. It's labor intensive and not cheap.
It also doesn't actually fix the _overall_ problem because screwworms will happily lay eggs in wild mammals too and so you will constantly be treating your livestock.
> We've had it solved for a long time
Yes, we solved it with mass releases of sterile flies over decades.
Also they don't genetically modify flies they still just irradiate the larva.
"Involve transgenics" is broad enough cover the intern doing literature reviews on related subjects. The discovery process on an unfamiliar domain is a jargon/term of art minefield, and the phrases that fly past me turn in to shibboleths.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...
The riskiness of it was quite high though. Wonder if people will consider reviving it in this case.
Coupled with SIT, pyrethroid, doramectin, ivermectin, debriding, dressing are just about 100% effective.
Thanks to our enlarged 230-strong Federal-contracted field workers.
Then the screw worm really spread over Mexico and the United states. The administration then stopped mexican cattle imports in the summer of 2025 again, panicked because of the spread of the screw worm, then started them again in the fall of 2025, panicked because of high beef prices.
Panama was the ideal place to control the screw worm because it was a small chokepoint. The flies that birth the screw worm cannot fly far by themselves, the screw worm moves with cattle, and cattle almost always moves by land. So COPEG acting at the chokepoint was a cheap and effective way to keep the screw worm from entering north america. The article talks about how great COPEG is, it does not mention that Musk's DOGE cut their funding.
But now the screw worm is all over Mexico and the US, the choke point is lost. Now they are spending much more money all over Latin America and the US with much smaller effect.
The article doesn’t mention those things because you’re wrong about both the facts and the timeline, and you’d know that, had you read the article.
> Mexican cattle imports were banned in the US in 2024 because of the screw worm. Then trump allowed mexican cattle imports in February 2025 even though the screw worm situation was not resolved.
True, but a red herring. The first cases of Mexican screwworm were in late 2024 / early 2025 [1]. The current circumstances began long before the current presidential administration (at least 2020), as TFA correctly notes.
> Then, in March 2025, Musk's DOGE cut funding for COPEG, the organization that suppresses the screw worm in Panama.
No. The funding cut was for an unrelated UN agency (FAO) not COPEG [2]. FAO does not implement the fly eradication program, per their own website [3], but partisan critics have purposely confused the two issues, which you can see an example of at [4]. They mention COPEG, then talk about the FAO issue, then don’t mention that the one is unrelated to the other, because they want the reader to confuse the two.
In fact, the administration did not cut funding to COPEG, funding $165M in FY2025, with a supplemental grant of $21M the same year [5].
I have my problems with the current administration, and certainly don’t think they’re innocent here, but this kind of fact-free political backbiting that actively confuses the issue drives me batty.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-confirms-first...
[2] https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...
[3] https://www.fao.org/animal-health/animal-diseases/new-world-...
[4] https://ticotimes.net/2026/06/06/flesh-eating-fly-that-sprea...
[5] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/HTML/IN125...
It is not a red herring that Trump allowed cattle imports from mexico when it was widely known that the screw worm was in mexico. It was a very serious lapse in safety and disease prevention.
Furthermore, DOGE did cut federal funding for programs for monitoring and curtailment of the screw worm in Central America in February 2025, and your own links show that. For example your link [2] says the above sentence almost verbatim. The FAO issue is not unrelated to the to the COPEG issue. The FAO also funded programs for detection and curtailment of the screw worm in central america just like COPEG. They were probably complimentary programs.
I could not find any link that COPEG funding was cut, but then again you showed no evidence that it was not cut. DOGE insisted on secrecy and was very vindictive, so a lot of DOGE cuts are not known and there is no definite public list of DOGE cuts. Furthermore, federal employees are scared. Any cuts to FAO programs would be made public because the FAO is an international organization and their employees are not at risk of being fired by Trump. But COPEG is an US organization and everyone in there will be scared to mention funding cuts to the media.
By the way, your statement that the Tump administration funded COPEG with 165 million in 2025 and a supplemental grant of 21 million is an outright falsehood and it is a falsehood proven by your own link [5]. Your own link [5] says that the 165 million funding came in 2024, not 2025 which would make it something done by the Biden administration. The supplemental 21 million funding came in 2025 but that was for fruit flies, not screw worm producing flies, so it did not go to COPEG.
I wonder, did you not read your own links, or did you know you were saying lies and hope that nobody else will read your links.
So in summary, DOGE did cut funding for screw worm detection and prevention in early 2025. Trump did allow Mexican cattle in the US in early 2025, even though it was known that the screw worm is in Mexico. It is not entirely clear whether DOGE cut funding for COPEG exactly or whether it only cut funding for other non-COPEG screw worm detection and prevention programs, but funding for screw worm detection and prevention was cut.
From the link:
> APHIS received emergency funding of $109.8 million in 2023 and $165 million in 2024 from the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) for screwworm response activities. In May 2025, USDA announced an additional $21 million transfer of CCC funds to convert an existing fruit-fly-rearing facility in Metapa, Mexico, into a sterile fly-rearing facility.
The Trump administration didn’t start until January of 2025.
If you don’t want to give them credit for funding the project in the current financial year, fine, but then it’s especially dishonest to blame them for “defunding” during the same time period. (Particularly when that’s not true - I cited that explicitly to show that funding was not stopped.)
> I could not find any link that COPEG funding was cut, but then again you showed no evidence that it was not cut.
Other than the part I just quoted for you? The part you obviously read, since you cited it in your comment?
Nobody is arguing with you that the current administration cut funding for FAO. They did. What I’ve shown you is that this is is not the same thing as COPEG, FAO is not the prevention program, and even if it were, the cuts were far too late to have caused a problem that began six years ago.
Bird flu, screwworm monitoring among foreign aid programs killed by Trump
See: https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...
Elect stupid leaders, get stupid consequences.
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nws-visit...
It's right there, linked in TFA. The press release provided by the GP is instead discussing funding for the "UN Food and Agriculture Organization", which is different. Apparently they also do some unspecified amount of work on the issue.
Y’all are just absolutely fixated on blaming one side for this.
Stop letting partisan politics dominate your thinking. It’s preventing you from seeing the full scope of the problem.
Yes, the screwworm problem predates the funding cut. Surely that should prompt an increase or at least a maintenance of existing funding for monitoring programs though, certainly not a decrease.
I think atoav is saying the /stupid consequence/ is the cut in funding itself, not the screwworm resurgence.
My point is that the instinct to be partisan on this issue is inane, but also factually incorrect.
> Yes, the screwworm problem predates the funding cut.
Great, so we're agreed that this is at least a bi-partisan problem.
> Surely that should prompt an increase or at least a maintenance of existing funding for monitoring programs though, certainly not a decrease.
Fortunately, it is. This was linked directly from TFA:
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/nws-visit...
I'm more than happy to acknowledge any failures by Dem leadership because I'm not a party member and even if I were I would not let that blind me to the reality of that failure.
I don't write that to demean them, I'd like it if it wasn't so -- this comment is in no way intended to be deragotory.
That said, I think this substantiates the notion that with conservatives "every accusation is a confession", because they can only see the world through their eyes they assume everybody else thinks like them.
has it done anything to prevent/mitigate this? or the opposite?