The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

Very cool for those involved to be able to work on such a practical and helpful research problem. It feels like most research is so removed from practicality, or a problem looking for a solution. I’m sure there were lots of blind alleys not covered, but overall it’s a very “feel good” scientific story.

I wonder if anyone ever did the math on whether trying to maintain a barrier at the Darian Gap with occasional failures was really a better financial choice than teaming up with South American countries to drive screwworms to extinction.

> Overall, the screwworm program seems like a classic case of something becoming a victim of its own success: a problem got solved so thoroughly that we forget how big of a problem it was, and we gradually undermine the conditions that made the solution possible.

Chesterson's Fence strikes again. It's so easy to wax poetic about how ineffective government spending always is and should be cut to the bone that we don't stop to recognize that preventative programs like this save us from billions in economic losses.

Out of curiosity I looked up the cost to south American beef producers like Argentina/brazil. The extra constant animal inspections costs ~$10 per cattle up until slaughter I think. Not a huge cost but a pain nonetheless.

> Eventually capable of producing more than 200 million screwworm flies a week, the Mission factory was a grotesque marvel of insect-producing efficiency. Operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it was, in essence, a 76,000-square-foot artificial wound. Trays full of meat, blood, and water, each one heated to the exact right temperature to stimulate screwworm growth, moved through the facility on a monorail system timed to the lifecycle of the screwworm.

Imagine working at the screwworm factory.