They’re baaaaack! The New World Screwworm, that is. We’re now seeing a few cases of this particularly nasty pest in the Southern states. It’s almost exclusively a cattle problem, but they can infect, and in worst-case scenarios, kill other animals and even human beings. Unsuppressed, they cause billions in damage.

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It will be no surprise to learn that greenie types oppose completely eradicating this uniquely destructive scourge.

The ugly little buggers are flies, which lay their eggs in open wounds and mucus membranes of living creatures. The eggs—200 to 300—hatch within a day, and the larvae/maggots—the screwworms—burrow in, eating muscle, flesh, fat, whatever, for several days until they fall out and hatch into flies and start the cycle again. In so doing, they usually kill the animal. The ugly little monsters are capable of boring through human skulls, though that is exceedingly rare.

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Like most insects, they thrive only in warmer climates. Winter kills them, so they’re largely confined to the Southern U.S.

We successfully pushed them out of the U.S. decades ago:

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In the 1930’s, Raymond Bushland and Edward Knipling were studying the screwworm in Texas where it was devastating livestock herds. These two scientists proposed and developed the “sterile insect technique” (SIT), which involves breeding the insects, sterilizing them with radiation, and releasing them into the wild. Because the female screwworm fly mates only once, if she mates with a sterile male fly any eggs she lays will not produce maggots.

This has the immediate benefit of stopping the maggots from killing livestock but also has the long term benefit of eradicating these little assholes. Of course this would mean intentionally breeding sterile flies on an industrial scale and releasing millions of them into the wild. So that is what they decided to do. 

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In 1954, this strategy was tested on a small island of Curaçao. The screwworm was eliminated from the island in the space of seven weeks.

Over the next 30-40 years, there was a major push for screwworm eradication in North America. It was driven out of the US in the 60’s. With enormous international cooperation, they were pushed out of Mexico and Belize in the 80’s and eradication was pushed down to Panama by the 1990’s.

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By a happy accident of geography, Panama was an excellent choke-point for the screwworm eradication. We could effectively maintain a screwworm border in Panama with a minimal effort because the geographic area to sterilize was physically small and politically stable. This also meant that screwworm control could be maintained through limited screwworm production facilities based in Panama and managed by COPEG, a joint commission between Panama and the US. COPEG is an institution specifically founded to maintain control over the screwworm barrier in Panama.

And that’s where the barrier remained until around 2022, which is when more cases appeared in Panama and began to spread northward. This is not, by the way, a food safety issue. The worms don’t remain in meat. It’s a food production problem.

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How did this happen? That’s an interesting and mysterious story. The official line is that there were supply chain disruptions associated with the Covid pandemic that limited the Panama production of sterile flies necessary for screwworm containment.

Democrats have, of course, blamed Trump, and more particularly, his shuttering of USAID, which they’d discovered is a convenient excuse for anything wrong in the entire world, as is, to their way of thinking, Trump himself:

Graphic: X Post

But Rollins is correct. The Biden Handler’s Administration had other fish to fry, including a “whole-of-government” weaponization against Normal Americans. What’s also highly likely is that throwing open our borders, which encouraged mass migration of people, livestock, insects, and animals of all kinds, played a significant role. There was virtually no vetting of people during those years, and certainly none of the usual, careful examination for signs of Screwworms. Some illegal immigrants were surely infested.

It seems very likely that unchecked northward migration of livestock herds in 2022-2023 was a big factor in this ongoing disaster. Expert entomologists have looked at the pattern with exasperation and concluded that this is really the only plausible explanation since the flies themselves simply do not spread that quickly on their own. They were almost certainly transported via unchecked northward migration of people and animals.

Ivermectin, demonized by Bidenites, is an effective means of combatting Screwworms when added to livestock food, and the USDA is ramping up the production of sterile flies, which will, in a few years, once again control Screwworm populations. 

The long-overdue demise of USAID cut off many illicit Democrat revenue streams, but other agencies are charged with and more than capable of dealing with things like Screwworms. There is one positive: we’re again reminded just how destructive Democrats in power are. Perhaps we can remember that in 2026 and 2028?

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.