The government’s plan to fight a livestock-threatening plague sounds like a movie plot: dropping millions of flies from planes
To stop a flesh-eating parasite from crossing the border, the U.S. is reviving an unusual Cold War-era tactic involving irradiated insects.
It starts like a horror story: a fly lands on a cow’s open wound, lays 300 eggs, and within a day those eggs hatch into larvae that eat the animal alive. The victim, usually a cow or horse, dies in a week or two if untreated.
At first glance, the solution may sound like satire – air-dropping hundreds of millions of sterilized flies across the United States Southwest to stop a deadly livestock infestation – but this isn’t science fiction. It’s an emergency response to an old enemy.
Meet the flesh-eating screwworm
The New World screwworm, a parasitic maggot that feeds on the living flesh of warm-blooded animals, has made a comeback in Central America after 20 years of dormancy. Almost like the measles, one may say! The pest, Cochliomyia hominivorax to give it its formal name, has now reached southern Mexico. That’s uncomfortably close to U.S. ranchlands, triggering fears of an outbreak that could devastate the $10 billion American cattle industry, as CNN reports.
So, the USDA is dusting off a proven (if bizarre) playbook from the 1960s. Back then they bred sterilized male screwworm flies, irradiate them until they’re reproductively useless, then release them by plane over rural areas. Females mate once, so when they pair with a sterile male, their eggs don’t hatch. Over time, the population collapses.
The hitch with this plan is scale. The U.S. relies on a single facility in Panama that produces 100 million sterile flies each week. But to stop this outbreak, they’ll need hundreds of millions more. In June, the USDA announced plans for a new fly-breeding center near the Texas-Mexico border, plus a full renovation of an old Mexican facility.
It won’t be cheap. The new operation could cost upwards of $300 million. But the alternative – a multibillion-dollar hit to the livestock economy – would be far worse. Ports have already been closed, and ranchers are checking their cattle daily for signs of infection.
This might sound like the plot of a B-movie, but fighting parasites with aerial fly drops may be the country’s best defense against an invisible invasion already knocking at the door.
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