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If you think that screwworm is just an excuse to raise prices, I think that you badly misunderstand the situation.
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#12> 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…
I was born with no sense of smell [0] and I always wondered if I could combine that with my tech skills to be CTO at a place like the screwworm factory or possibly Waste Management. 0 - https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1559865770515087360?s=20
> I applied this principle and married someone with a great sense of smell
May you and your smelling nose wife live happily ever after.
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#13I 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.
Yes, they did because various countries have talked to the US about expanding it. The problem is that South America is an enormous place, whereas Panama is a narrow isthmus. It could have been done with some amount of money, but that opportunity ended in 2010 at the latest.
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Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#14[deleted]
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#15[flagged]
Eggs were just plan old boring corruption with price fixing in 2004-2008. And then again in 2022-2025.
Big Eggs made $1.2B and the fine is $3.3M and donating 53M eggs.
Yeah, that'll stop 'em from doing it again.
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#16[dead]
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#17> 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.
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they did because various countries have talked to the US about expanding it. The problem is that South America is an enormous place, whereas Panama is a narrow isthmus. It could have been done with some amount of money, but that opportunity ended in 2010 at the latest.
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Hmm, that seems to contradict the article directly - insecticides were used to try to battle screwworm initially and were not really effective - the solution was using sterile male flies to stop reproduction - which would work in South America just as well as it did in North (with sufficient scale)
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#19Out 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.
Surely the bigger issue is not the inspections, but the loss of infected livestock?
It's not some contagious disease that will spread to every animal. One can just treat the infected cattle until they get healthy again.
Re: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted for being misinformation]
Hmm, that seems to contradict the article directly - insecticides were used to try to battle screwworm initially and were not really effective - the solution was using sterile male flies to stop reproduction - which would work in South America just as well as it did in North (with sufficient scale)
You and the article are correct so I erased my comment.
I found and read through some of the reports of the time to try and prove myself correct. I'm wrong.
https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/speccoll/exhibits/show/sto...