Standards - Screwworm Prevention

Guess which completely preventable thing is back? New World Screwworms! Prevention was working as intended, then the DOGE cuts happened, and now the Republicans are using funds for food banks to fix a problem that they created. This administration said "tear down all the Chesterton's fences". 

-o-
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey MJ, are you for or against flesh-eating parasites? Are you a fan?

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Usually against. I remember I don't know where I saw this. Maybe it was Animal Planet, but when I was a kid, there was uh several Discovery Channel or Animal Planet shows that showed this really gruesome scene of someone trying to pull like a grub out of their body. Like oh gosh. They went to like some jungle or whatever or Africa, and then there's this massive like maggot-looking bug they have to pull out of someone, and it's scarred me for life.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

So, no, not a fan.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Okay. See, I kind of expected you were gonna say something like that, and yet I was still not prepared.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, it was huge. It was like a size of like a I want to say a Ferrero Rocher. It's huge.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Wow. Okay. Um, so you're gonna be real happy that we're talking about flesh-eating parasites today, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

I suppose so, because what fresh hell are we experiencing in this timeline?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

I'm sure you've seen this. There is currently a new world screw worm outbreak happening in Texas as we talk.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Yes, and several very quotable and clippable statements from the current what is she? Who is she? She's the head of something.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Oh, she's the Secretary of Agriculture?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yeah, absolutely incompetent.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Brooke Rollins, Rollins?

SPEAKER_01 1:18

I don't care about her enough to know her name, but like absolutely incompetent. And it was on full display in every single press conference that she had to the point where I'm like, if you had any sense of self-preservation, you would just start denying press conferences, but they keep doing it. Like they're not aware enough to be like, maybe I shouldn't talk.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yeah, it's every time I hear a statement about it, I just wonder where they're going. But luckily for us, this horror story that is happening, we're gonna talk about it today. And it really is a great topic for standards. So today's episode is a little bit different from a typical standards episode. So we normally talk about a regulation that's recently been repealed or undermined and then speculate what it means going forward. But today, that damage to the regulatory network is a year old, and that is long enough to go that today we get to talk about the real-time horrors that are happening.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yeah, it's a retrospective study now. Like enough time has passed since the incident that we're seeing the effects.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Yes. So please join us for our retrospective horror story.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Two intro. This is standards, and everything is helping out the podcast, tracking the regulations that keep us safe and the efforts to dismantle them.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

And we're Elizabeth and MJ, two public health scientists trying to remind people that rules and limitations aren't always a bad thing. Regulations are written in blood. And the question is, whose blood are we using?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Cow's blood.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

It's written in flesh this time.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Cow's flesh. Sounds gross. Okay, so where are we starting?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

So when I was looking into this, I happened to be reading a novel at the same time that I was doing the research for this, and they talked about the parable of Chesterton's fence. I was really curious. I'd not heard it before. Have you ever heard of it?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

I have not, and also I believe this is one of those parables that are not as broadly known.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

I wouldn't be shocked. When I read it and I looked into it, I was like, oh, we talk about this all the time, but I've never actually heard it referred to by its name.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

As a parable, right.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

And so G.K. Chesterton was an English writer. He wrote The Father Brown Mysteries, probably the best well-known things. There's a PVC series about it. And he wrote many other things, including some books on Christian theology. And in one of his books, he told the story of a fence. He asked someone, if you come across a fence or gate across the road, a modern reformer might go up to it and say, I don't see the use of this, let's clear it away. But the more intelligent reformer will say, if you don't see the use, find out what the use is. And you need to know that before you get rid of it.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, very applicable to our freaking nightmare of a timeline today. You have a bunch of tech bros because they made a lot of money doing whatever in the tech and finance space, they think they're like, Oh, I must be a genius in every aspect. Right. And so them, without any public health knowledge, will look at a program and be like, oh, this doesn't do anything. Right. But they don't get it. They don't understand what that program is. And then they just think it's a waste of money.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Right. And it's really funny because this is a principle in programming as well. You don't get rid of something until you know why it's there.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

It's such an important principle in programming. Like anyone who even knows even a little bit about coding knows that when you're handed old code, you do not touch anything until you figured out what that line of code does.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

The most famous example is the Team Fortress Coconut. Have you heard about this?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

I did hear about this. That story is wild.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

I'll give the summary of it is Team Fortress is a game produced by Valve, I believe. And there is a picture, a JPEG of a coconut somewhere in that game's code. No one knows why it's there, but if you take it away, the entire game crash. And to this day, no one knows why that if you take that JPEG away, the game crash. It's known as the Team Fortress Coconut at this point.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yeah. Honestly, this is a really good parable for public health as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

There are an awful lot of things that we do that on the surface don't seem to matter or it seem to be that important. But because human health and disease are so intricate and are influenced by so many outside factors, it's really easy to take away something that doesn't seem to matter and have the whole system come crashing down.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Absolutely. So how does this tie back to flesh-eating parasites?

SPEAKER_00 5:57

I'm so glad you asked. Let's talk a little bit about the New World Screwworm.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Okay, tell me.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Okay, they are they're blowflies. People have probably heard of blowflies. They get talked about a lot because these are insects that lay eggs in rotting meat. The New World screw worm is a little special. The screw worms in general are a little special because the females, the adult females, lay their eggs in the flesh of other organisms. So living flesh, not dead carrion.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

That's the difference.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

That is the difference. The eggs are laid in wounds or in like the mucosal membranes, so inside the nose and whatnot. And as the larvae hatch, they will begin to feed on the fluid that is in the wound being secreted by the underlying tissue. And as they feed, they start burrowing downwards, headfirst, into the wound in this sort of screw-like fashion, which already sounds super pleasant. But you can guess that while they're feeding and while they're burrowing, they tear the tissue. They've got like these hook-like mouths. So they tear, they deepen the wound, they widen the wound, they cause it to emit this awful odor.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

I didn't know about that.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Oh, yes. And that odor, it's very attractive to other screw worms. So gravid females, females who are looking to lay eggs, will be attracted to these wounds that have already had eggs laid in them, and they will lay further batches of eggs. So it's just sort of the problem just keeps getting worse.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Yeah. Well, the definition of a parasite is that they do not care. Ultimately, they do not care about the health of the host, hence parasite. The burrowing is, I can only imagine, an evolutionary mechanism to prevent them from getting removed easily.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Oh, I'm sure. It's difficult. It requires quite a bit of work to remove the parasites. I don't think cows are a frequent host, and I don't think the cows can do it themselves.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

No, not with their hooves.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Yeah. No. And a severe infestation, if it's left untreated, it can result in the death of the host animal within seven to ten days. Long enough for the next generation of screw worms to hatch and feed and go off on their merry way.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Definitely a big issue for anyone who relies on animals for their livelihood.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Right. So it's also a big issue for anyone who works with animals because humans are not usually the host, but humans can be. They can be infected. This particular parasite can make that jump.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

It's not that selective.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

No. Um, and in particular, in the US, it has been traditionally a very big problem for farmers and ranchers in the southwestern U.S. Texas, in particular, has been hit very hard, partly because of how much trade happens with Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Also, the weather is probably perfect for some parasites like this.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Yeah, I mean, they're a tropical worm or a tropical parasite, so they thrive in very warm areas. There have been reports of the New World Screwworm since at least 1842 in the Southwest.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Okay, old problem.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

It's an old problem. And in 1933, it actually became a very big problem for the US because infected animals were shipped from the southwest into the southeast. And from there, the infestation sort of just exploded around the deep south.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

That is how disease works. You have a vector, and if that vector, well, in nature, that vector would have to walk, but unfortunately, in industrial agriculture, that vector is on a truck. Yep. And that vector is sliding across the country at breakneck pace.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah. You know, with the rise of trains and shipping and trucks and whatnot, the screw worm is getting to new places much faster and much more easily than it might have done in centuries past. Cows don't have to walk anymore.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Farther than they could have ever dreamed of, that parasite.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Yes. So in the past few centuries, the screw worm might have been uh sort of localized to maybe the tropics, but you have an infected cow that comes further north. That screw worm is coming too. And then it's there's a naive population that is just ripe for the picking.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

It's kind of like invasive species. There's no native protection against it. Not that the cows had any native protection to begin with, but yeah, it's spreading to places that people have not seen.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

And I think that is really key, is the way we did things did not make it harder for the screw worm to spread. This became a big enough problem that in 1935, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, started something called the Screwworm Educational Program, meant to train farmers on how to prevent the screwworm infestations. It's an amazing collection of literature and video uh that you can still find in the USDA archives. There was one particular video which was horrifying, and yet I couldn't stop watching it.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

It's gross, but it also looks fascinating at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah, basically. And these videos trained farmers on aggressive wound cleaning, how to treat within insecticides, and what they could do to prevent infestation. There's no vaccines, treatments are really intensive. So the screwworm educational program did a lot of focusing on preventing the infestation, stopping it before it starts.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, like with something like parasitic infections, it is more visible to the naked eye. And unlike a virus where you just kind of had to like sit back and pray that it doesn't spread, with parasitic stuff, you can see the parasites, and that makes it much easier to control in some aspect. So definitely like the strategy of surveillance and prevention is probably the way to go.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Yes, it really is. And then in the 1950s, two scientists with the USDA.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Science for the wind.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Yes, Raymond Bushland and Edward Nippling, they developed something called the sterile insect technique.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

I've heard of this, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Yeah, I was gonna say it's pretty famous. It's getting talked about a lot now, but it's pretty famous among a lot of insect vectors. It was actually developed partly to actively eliminate new world screw worm populations in the US. So essentially what they do is they hatch out male screw worms and then they sterilize them with radiation and release them into the wild. When the sterile males are released, they will mate with females, and the females they mate with will only lay unfertilized eggs. And now female screw worms only mate once, and that's why this works.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

It stops the propagation.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

It stops the propagation. They first tested it successfully on Sanibel Island in Florida, and then they were able to use it in 1954. They were able to use it to eliminate screw worms from the island of Curacao. In just seven weeks, they managed to take out the whole population.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, island geography is it's interesting in that you could just eliminate an animal if you really wanted to. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but in this case it's better.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Right. One of the benefits is they didn't introduce another predator, so they didn't accidentally cause another problem. They were able to within seven weeks eliminate the population and basically save the goat herds, which the people of Curacao were relying on for milk and meat.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

Fantastic. Science is is so good when it works, you know? Like when you just let it do its job. Science is amazing. Who would ever want to kill this?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Well, and it's such an elegant solution, too. Like when reading about it, I'm just so impressed by how beautiful it is.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

The technique's actually gotten a lot better. Like they had to use radiation to sterilize the male, but now there's uh a new technique using essentially gene editing, where they in a lab they affect part of the insect or whatever parasite or something with gene editing so that when they propagate, their next generation also has this thing. And then you can rely on the law of exponential growth. Like they did this with the malaria, they breed a batch of mosquitoes that the malaria parasite can't reproduce inside. It's so good. Like with gene editing, like the power of this principle just exponentially got better.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yeah, this method is the basis of a lot of amazing pest control. Okay, after 1954, the USDA began to use this method to control the screw worm population in the US. And they initially declared New World screw worms eradicated in the US in 1966.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Must be nice, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Here's the problem it wasn't eradicated in Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, and diseases don't care about borders.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Yep. So there was a devastating resurgence in the southwest in 1972. I think I read an estimate of 90,000 screw worms or sorry, 90,000 cattle affected by the screw worms. It caused lots of problems. We'll get into that, but this particular resurgence was beaten back. It was controlled by a joint effort between the US and Mexico called Mission 77. And their goal was to eradicate it from the southwestern US and then keep pushing it further south, eradicating it throughout Mexico. They ended up pushing the screw arm south to the narrowest part of Mexico where they thought they could sort of have have an easier time creating this insect barrier. So you push them to a very small area and then you focus all of your eradication and population control efforts in that area. It's a more effective way of working, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

That was happening throughout the 1970s. And throughout the 1980s, they kept pushing this barrier further and further south. So they were able to eliminate the screw worm from Mexico and Belize. And then in the 1990s, 1994, actually, they managed to push it to Panama.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Wow, Central America.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Do you know much about Panama?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

The thing I know about Panama is that they have this stretch of land that is so jungle, for lack of a better term, that they can't do anything about it. Like it just sits there.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

The Darien Gap. Yes. The Darien Gap is on the southernmost part of Panama, and it's that skinny little isthmus. So it's a very, very narrow zone. And that became the barrier between the New World Screwworm and Central and North America.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Science can do great things.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Yes. The Panama and the US created a commission for the eradication and prevention of screwworm or COPEG. This particular commission has been responsible for maintaining the barrier, coordinating the eradication efforts, and also running a facility in Panama where sterile males are produced for release into the Darien Gap, basically.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Countries working together. Isn't that nice?

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Right? It's a great little story. And this barrier actually, we were able to maintain it pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

And there have been some isolated breakthroughs before this year. There was one in 2017 in the Florida Keys. But by and large, the New World Screwworm has been stopped in Panama and not affecting us. At least it used to be.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

It'd be so nice if the story just ended there and then we live in like a functioning country.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, but that's because I like causing you pain. So it doesn't end there.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Yeah, that's this entire series. Okay, so let's move on to our current timeline.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Okay. So to understand why we are now in this situation where we have the screw worm barrier failed and we've got screw worms back in Texas again. We need to pivot a little and talk about the organization within the US that protects agriculture from pests and diseases.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

That makes sense. Like they seem to be the one responsible for something like this.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, and so in the US, it's the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which the acronym is APHIS, which I love because I can't I keep wanting to pronounce it as APHID, like the little bugs.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

It's kind of cute.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

But it's not, it's AFIS.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

AFIS.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

And so APHIS was formed in 1972 as a result of the consolidation and reorganization in the agricultural department. And they've actually had regulatory powers over disease management in domestic and exotic animal diseases, including those diseases within livestock, since 2002. They were granted that by the Animal Health Protection Act. And that is probably the only law we're going to talk about today. So there you go. You get your law.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

I get my regulations. So they established this in uh 2002, which seems like a very important thing and seems like something that everyone should be on board with.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Right. I think everyone does agree that APHIS is a good thing. And this is the department that's taking point in the response to the current New World Screwworm threat. There's also a very small unit within APHIS called the APIs Foreign Service. And it's pretty cool because it's actually the smallest foreign service unit in the US government. I think I read it was like 30 people. It's a really small group of people. So the people within this are both diplomats, but they're also technical specialists in things like veterinary medicine, plant pathology, entomology, biology. So things that allow them to understand the science and the technical details with regards to disease management.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Seems like this is right up their alley.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Right. And because they're aphid foreign service, they don't work within the US. They work within, I think it's 28 partner countries, and they coordinate with local staff in these countries to keep American agriculture and food secure. Because, as we learned in 1972, you can't eradicate a disease that affects livestock if you are bringing in livestock from other places where that disease is not eradicated.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Big principle in public health diseases do not respect borders. And therefore, like global health is such an important concept. Like you can't address infectious disease, especially something that affects things like livestock. We keep breeding them and keep transporting them for food reasons. You can't do this in one country, it just doesn't work like that.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

It really doesn't. I mean, we got a very brutal lesson in 1972. We keep getting smacked in the face with these lessons. One day, maybe we'll learn it. So the Aphist Foreign Service uh does actually work with CopEG really to maintain that insect barrier in Panama in the Darien Gap.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Right. Releasing the sterilized male screw worms.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Releasing the sterilized male screw worms, inspecting animals that are being exported for agricultural reasons, and also maintaining in the facility where the sterile male screw worms are being bred. And so this is where we run into Chesterton's fence, MJ.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Yeah, because I can imagine that a program that involves breeding tiny insects, sterilizing them, and releasing them into the wild. Like if you don't know anything about biology or public health or science in general, you would see that program and be like, ew, gross. Why are we doing this?

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Right. That's such a waste of government money, right? Well, you have entered the mind of Elon Musk and his Department of Government efficiency.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Yeah, what a dumpster fire that was.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

So you might remember that on day one of Trump's second term, he announced a 90 day pause in all foreign aid.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah. Absolutely one of the most self sabotaging decisions in American government history, which is saying all A lot because American government's history, the bar is low. Right. And they fully tanked to last place.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Right. Well, and then I know for a fact you remember that USAID, is it USAID or USAID? People say USAID. Okay. So then I know for a fact that you remember that USAID was dismantled and all of its grants were terminated in February 2025. So a little more than a year ago, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:25

There is an argument that can be made that Elon Musk is one of history's most successful mass murderers because of how many people rely on USAID or USAIT, foreign aid. Yeah, it would put him in line with some of the worst people in history, like Hitler and Mao and Stalin by some accounts. Absolutely terrible.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Yeah, and we have a public health explained episode about USAID too, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yes. Check it out.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

You should go check that out. Okay. Well, among the programs and funds that were terminated with the dissolution of USAID were the program and funds being used for screwer monitoring and prevention efforts in Panama and other Central American countries.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Yeah, I could see that tech bro brain working of like, why are we doing this in these poor countries that we don't care about? Because they're also racist in this scenario.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Right. And so this includes some of the money for Copeg. So like breeding the sterile flies, but it also includes money for things like inspection of exported cattle or cattle that's being exported to the US.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Such an important step in the process.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

And now to add on to this, we actually in 2020, the uh Copeg facility in Panama faced supply line issues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so there was a shortage of the sterile insects and a lapse in regular cattle inspections. So screw worms made it through the dairying gap and started spreading northward.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

These pests, like especially insects, they are very persistent.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

Oh, yes. And we knew it had been moving northward. I mean, you can look back as uh news articles as far as 2023, and people are sounding the alarm about screw worms again. Um, and in then November 2024, Mexico announced that screw worms had been found in Chiapas, one of their southern states.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Wow, those worms were moving fast.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

They were roving very fast, and the US temporarily paused cattle importation from Mexico as a result of this. So that's November 2024. Trump enters office January 2025, suspends foreign aid, and then dismantles USAID in February 2025. And the funds for monitoring screw worms, the prevention efforts, and also the cattle inspections get yanked. And it happens to get yanked just days before the US reinstated cattle imports from Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

It's truly like all the pieces lined up for one giant catastrophe that we are witnessing now.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Right. It's just it's all these little things because had the funding still been there for these prevention efforts, might have not happened.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Had the fence, the layers of fence still been there, something could have stopped or slowed this. But we just merrily took it all down.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Because tech bros have no idea how public health works.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Yeah, and I should say the APIS Foreign Service is under the USGA and not USAID. And so it was not impacted directly by the dismantling of USAID, but it's not unreasonable to guess that the grants to the APHIS Foreign Service local staff and the local partners, those grants were cut, basically. We do know that the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, which was heavily involved in the monitoring programs, lost its financial support from the US when USAID was shuttered.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Yeah, and there's a lot of commentary to be said here. Like one of them is definitely how interconnected everything is. Like, even though they're not directly under USAID or USAID, it's still very much affected because of how connected everything is. But also, I think right now, things like this, but also for military reasons like NATO, people are realizing that hey, maybe maybe all of these global initiatives shouldn't rely on one single country or majorly rely on one single country. Right. Like NATO, a big part of NATO is just the US will intervene.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Right. Yeah. What is it? The arsenal of democracy is what I've heard the US called.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

That is a separate discussion. Yeah, so there is a lot of interconnection. And these USAID grants, these foreign grants, were not just something we were handing out willy-nilly. There was a reason for a lot of them.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

The amount of paperwork and checks that goes into these things, I don't think people appreciate. And the tech bros certainly don't understand. Like they think we're just handing these out.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Yeah, because they come from a world where move fast, break things. Right? Move fast break things. Venture capitalists will always give you more money. But that's not how government works. There was a lot of reasoning behind this decision or the decision to fund it, not the decision to yank it. It is also worth pointing out that the USDA workforce did shrink by somewhere between 20 and 25% as a result of Elon Musk and Doge's cuts. That the USDA does include APHIS and the APIS Foreign Service. The Trump's agricultural department has put out a statement saying that the USDA workforce cuts did not impact APHIS.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

I don't believe that.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yeah, I have no way to check, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah, but their track record is poor enough that I think we can just assume that that's false. Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

APHIS Foreign Service is currently hiring, though. So you know. Yeah, a little too late. Right? Anyway, you know, there is good news. We've been here before. We know how to fight New World Screwworm infestations. APHIS has swung into action. Okay. And so they're actively working on managing and eradicating the current outbreak. If you've been following some of the funding, there are now emergency grants being given out for breeding new sterile flies and also research projects. So like 105 million across 40 different research projects on how to combat the New World Screwworm. And then 750 million for the development of a 300 million per week sterile fly facility in Texas.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

These are all good, but I do want to point out that the prevention costs would have been cheaper.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

I'm so glad you brought that up.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Yeah. Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

The emergency grants, it's over $850 million. That doesn't include the money that we put back into CovePeg so that they could quadruple their sterile fly breeding program. USAID spent $15 million a year on the monitoring programs. A fraction. So, you know, it's a good thing we saved that money by cutting these grants, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Like you mentioned the venture capitalist mindset. Like a big part of the tech space mindset to them, they're thinking about Q1 profits. They're thinking about like, oh, it doesn't matter if things down the line happens, that's the next CEO's problem. Right. When you're in tech and finance, if you fail, I guess nothing that bad happens. Like I guess you need to find a new job, but that's about it.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

If you're the one making the decisions and you failed, you get like the golden parachute payoff.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Yeah, if you're a C-suite, you get the golden parachute.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

They pay you to go away.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Yeah, they pay you to go away. Even if you're a worker or like a middle level management, I'm just gonna say unemployment is not as bad as like a screw worm outbreak. They're coming from the mindset of like, ah, whatever, it's so pernicious. And we see that play out live in real time with this.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah, and don't forget that Musk publicly called USAID a crazy waste of money.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Because he's thinking Q1, he's thinking Q1 profits.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Even so $15 million a year was spent on screw worm monitoring programs. Maybe you're saying, well, not you, I know you wouldn't say this, but for anyone who is arguing, well, it was definitely more than that, okay, the total amount given to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization for all global health security programs, which includes screw worms, avian influenza monitoring, avian influenza containment in both Central America and Asia, and also combating and containing swine fever. All of that together was only 250 million.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

Less than a third of this emergency funds.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

Less than a third of the emergency funds. Do you know where those emergency funds are coming from? This really pissed me off. Well, the U.S. Agricultural Department, Secretary of Agriculture, announced that it was fine. They were just going to pull the money from existing funding that was originally intended for local schools and food banks. Food programs at schools and food banks.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Is where they're getting this money from.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

It's where it's coming from.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

This level of maliciousness and complete lack of empathy, it borderlines on psychopathy. And I just don't understand why anyone would find this appealing.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Well, you know, this isn't the first time they've done it. In 2025, they did the same thing to fund the emergency response for avian influenza. They see the food banks and food security funding for kids as their own little piggy bank to make up for the fact that they cut these monitoring programs and now have to deal with the after effects.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

I stand by the statement like this type of mindset borderlines on psychopathy. And how much proof do people need to see that this type of mindset that is so prevalent on the right and Republicans, you cannot govern with this mindset. It just doesn't work. Like you'll constantly be pulling from the future to make patches now. It's not sustainable. You're robbing the youth, essentially, in many ways.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

You're gonna have to deal with this problem either in the future or you're gonna deal with it now. It's going to be cheaper to deal with it now. And a lot of times, that cheaper to deal with it now looks like sending aid to other countries to help them get the problem under control because it's gonna come for you.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Because diseases don't care about borders.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Diseases will get here. So that's you know, the cost of this particular outbreak is actually going beyond the 850 million in emergency measures. I'm sure. From the USGA website, I actually pulled it today because I I was very impressed that they stated this. The US livestock industry benefits by more than 900 million dollars a year as a result of the eradication of the screw worm. Also, it increases the quality of life for ranchers and farmers and results in fewer health care costs for them. Just because the screw worms are mostly in the cows doesn't mean it can't jump to humans.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

It's a pain for animals and people. I don't know how many times we need to see that prevention is just such a better strategy than constantly patching the holes on a sinking ship.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah, they're estimating that this particular outbreak could cause up to $1.8 billion in losses to the Texas economy, not the US economy, the Texas economy. Texas is about to be hit.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

Dang, and I wonder who Texas voted for. I don't know. I'll let the listeners figure that one out.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yeah, and honestly, so this estimate is coming from what they know the cost of the 1972 outbreak was. That particular outbreak, it cost the hardest hit states. So that was Texas, New Mexico, California, Arkansas, and Arizona. Collectively, it cost them more than 172 million, but that was in 1972 dollars. When you adjust for inflation and also the modern cattle evaluation, a 1972 scale outbreak is probably gonna cost between 2.5 and $6 billion.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Yeah, because it crossed multiple states.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Yikes, dude. Yeah, it's bad.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

It's bad. I mean, and we are at the very early stages of it right now. I looked at an estimate this morning, and I think it's hit like 16 cattle. It's hit some sheep and some goats and one dog. Oh, poor dog. I know. But they first announced that they found screw worms at the beginning of June. It is 20-something days after, and it's already jumped to more than that. It's gonna take time. And the sad truth is we cannot make enough sterile male screw worms to eradicate the population. At least not right now. Not right now. Uh the Copeg facility in Panama, like I mentioned earlier, has upped their production. They've quadrupled it to the maximum that it can do. I think they're producing, I think I read a hundred million sterile male flies a week. They're building the facility in Texas, but that's gonna take time too. So we are basically we're beating at the flames.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

But the fire is already there.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

The fire is already there, and we don't have our best tool ready, which is prevention. Yeah. So it didn't have to get this bad. It did not have to get this bad. Everyone saw it coming. This is not something that snuck up on them. You can look and people are warning about an outbreak coming as far back as 2023. And in May 2025, that's what, three months after USAID was shuttered. Senators from the Southwest introduced bills to Congress to authorize emergency funding to build a new sterile fly facility because they all knew it was coming.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yeah, and this certainly got swept under the rug.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Right?

SPEAKER_01 35:35

Other things were happening, but also it's definitive proof that they knew this was gonna be bad.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Right. Everyone knew it was gonna be bad. And well, everyone except Elon Musk, I guess, and Brooke Rollins and Donald Trump and everyone involved in that administration.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Who absolutely have no expertise in any of this? And the senators that introduced this in May, they're not all Democrats, right? From this list that I can see. No. Which means that they supported their party above their own self-interest, essentially. Because they saw this coming.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Yeah, and so it was introduced by Cornyn and Cruz from Texas, Lujan from New Mexico, and then Representative Gonzalez from Texas in the House. And I don't know if they thought that they didn't have anything to do with the defunding of USAID. And so I guess good for them for realizing this was a problem and introducing measures to get the money for it. Um, it was sponsored by a host of other names from some of the agricultural regions that have had issues with New World Screwworms in the past.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Which goes to show that they have the capacity to know, they have the capacity to understand that this is a problem, but they only care about this tiny sector that affects them and their industry's bottom line. They either can or won't extrapolate this principle to other areas. Like they were happy when Doge was doing his thing, but they they passed this specifically to protect themselves. It's not out of ignorance, because they knew this principle when they passed this or when they introduced this.

SPEAKER_00 37:09

Yeah, it's just it's just very frustrating. It's very frustrating. You know, this is just one story from USAID, but there are thousands more scattered throughout. We don't have time to go over all of them. We're not gonna see all of them come to fruition until much later. But if we're talking about fences, Chesterton's fence, this is not the only fence that we merrily ripped down.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Not even close. And the people who ripped it down knew that it was gonna be this bad, but they just want to make sure that it's not their fence. Well, that was depressing.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

That's okay. This is the norm for the show. And uh final thoughts. Um, another thing that I I thought about is when industry is threatened, suddenly all the money is there.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Suddenly they can pull from food banks for kids, right? Suddenly the money operates out of nothing when industry is threatened, which goes to show kind of in a very enraging way that the lack of action was never the lack of ability to act. Right. It was always a lack of call it political will or you know, interest. You know, when industry is threatened, suddenly everything is a problem. But when people are threatened, we shrug and move on.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Yeah, I didn't think I could get more angry about this, about just the utter unconcern about what they did until I realized that they've now pulled money from food banks for emergency measures to fix the problem that they caused twice. And not even in an apologetic way. No, just like, oh, we're reallocating this.

SPEAKER_01 38:48

It's bleak and I think perfectly encapsulate the current uh uh Republican Party at this point. I don't know what's appealing about this, I don't know why people continue to vote for this as if they are gonna change their ways, you know.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Yeah, well, Elon Musk, the tech bros, they really like breaking things.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

They really do, and they don't care because it's not their things. All right, thanks for listening. Happy music, happy music music, happy music, yes, right now, happy music. Thank you for listening to Public Health Is for Everyone. This is Standards, a podcast series about how regulation is kind of good, actually, and covering the efforts to deregulate all these things that keep us safe. Please follow us on Blue Sky Mastodon. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at everything ispublichealth at gmail.com. All the information regarding this podcast and also our sibling podcast, Everything is Public Health, can be found on our website, everything is publichealth.com. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, public health is for everyone.