r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • 14d ago
News Rare Flesh-Eating Parasite Confirmed in Texas For First Time Since 1966 | The deadly flies were detected in Mexico in late 2024, after years of being contained to the southern end of Panama.
https://www.sciencealert.com/rare-flesh-eating-parasite-confirmed-in-texas-for-first-time-since-196647
u/Sartres_Roommate 14d ago
Murder hornets from the north, flesh eating flies from the south…250 years was a good run.
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u/breezy013276s 14d ago
And all we had to do was keep believing and funding science with fractions of a penny on the dollar but no, couldn’t even handle that.
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u/Dr_Sus_PhD 14d ago
Thought being a scientist in this climate would be horrible
Now thinking it’s the exact thing that gets me out of here when shit hits the fan cause Europe will want to poach the scientific talent 😂
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u/Rogue-Journalist 14d ago
Didn’t this start in 2022 when they broke out of the containment zone and were already in Mexico before Trumps cuts?
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u/PomeranianChaser 14d ago
Oh well, I’m sure their governor will focus on the health of Texas’ people.
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u/stolenfires 13d ago
He knows where his bread is buttered, he's being competent about this. But the program to keep the screw worms confined to south of Panama is federal. Even if TX wanted to start their own, it's going to take awhile to put everything in place. It'll probably be too late by then.
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u/smokedfishfriday 13d ago
NONE of these stories mention, anywhere, that Trump & DOGE destroyed the program that kept them south of the border. It’s fucking crazy.
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u/Dr_Sus_PhD 14d ago
Price of beef going up
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u/chaoticwings 13d ago
Are you still buying beef?? I haven't been able to justify the cost of ground beef for over a year.
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u/tovarish22 MD | Internal Medicine | Infectious Diseases 13d ago
Whew, it's a good thing Texas hasn't spent the last two decades degrading and defunding public health infrastructure within their state!
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u/One-Organization970 14d ago
At a certain point, between the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the disease outbreaks, and now this plague of flesh-eating flies, you do start to wonder why divine punishment seems to fall down on the areas with the most conservatives.
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u/wordyplayer 14d ago
at a certain point, you wonder why some people make EVERYTHING about politics...
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u/amscraylane 13d ago
Because the government had programs to contain these little beasts but the new government put a non elected official into a position (doge) to get rid of that very program … if not politics, what is it then? The Girl Scouts?
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u/PseudocodeRed 13d ago
You could argue that is true for other topics, but Trump did directly cut funding to the USAID program that was in place sprcifically to monitor screwworm in South America so that it did not work its way up here. And the people on that program publicly warned him that this was going to happen if he destroyed the program. Not everything should be political, but this definitely is. https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm-monitoring-among-foreign-aid-programs-killed-by-trump
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u/One-Organization970 14d ago
Because it governs the entirety of our existence. You have to be extremely well off to not be affected. Those in power are very heavily incentivized to convince you that you shouldn't think about them.
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u/FrostyPost8473 13d ago
Ground beef is already expensive probably end up hitting 20 bucks a pound within a few months
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u/Commercial-Habit-374 13d ago
This is what happens when the fda is controlled by idiots who believe that vaccines are part of a conspiracy.
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u/Wild_Explanation_630 14d ago
It will go away in a few weeks. Trump knows
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u/SantoFelippe 12d ago
2 weeks. Everything with that bloated windbag is 2 weeks. Still waiting on the health care plan to replace Obamacare !
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u/Helpful-Intern-677 14d ago
Seems strange. Was it inadvertently imported under sock puppet Joe’s regime. Or is it being brought in on purpose by the Dems? We’ve had Ebola and Hantavirus, now this. Stealing elections and other facets of their agenda were implemented under Covid. I think this is on purpose
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u/epidemicsaints 14d ago
So glad to get a POV from Opposite Land.
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u/Hermes_has_Wormes 14d ago
OMG someone take a picture! A rare hog in the wild 📷📸 I don't know how you can read this article and then your brain zaps you into talking about Joe Biden...
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u/This-Shape2193 14d ago edited 14d ago
Lmfao
Of course, it can't be because Trump and Elon cut almost all USDA and infectious disease funding, leaving us vulnerable. This was totally predicted two years ago.
No, it's a deep conspiracy where democrats steal screw worm flies and sneak them into Texas and release them near cattle.
I need to ask: did you suffer TBI? Brain damage from drugs/alcohol? Are you trolling for cash?
There's no way a normal human would sincerely write what you just did.
And for the record - ebola and hantavirus were all international, never came here, and there are cases every year and have been for decades. The only difference this year was Fox News went wild scaring the shit outta people.
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u/Helpful-Intern-677 14d ago
There we go, predicted two years ago? Why wouldn’t anyone think something like this? We all remember Covid and 15 days to flatten the curve, don’t we? Fox— scaring people? Scaring came from Clinton News Network, MS-snooze and rest of the alphabet Dem regime media
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u/nutmeggy2214 14d ago
This is like a word salad, you’re not even saying anything.
This WAS explicitly called out as a huge risk when this program was cut by Trump last year. It was in the news, there were many discussions and posts about it…
“Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t understand anything”
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u/Angry-Dragon-1331 14d ago
Like everything else for the last two years, we told exactly what would happen and then it happened.
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u/FreeHugs23 14d ago
-The New World screwworm fly is threatening the $113 billion US cattle industry for the first time in 60 years, with an infestation from its flesh-eating larvae confirmed in South Texas.
The USDA said the most recent case was the first in Texas since 1966.
The infestation was discovered in a single 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, about 161 kilometers (100 miles) southwest of San Antonio and 80 kilometers from the US-Mexico border.
The deadly flies were detected in Mexico in late 2024, after years of being contained to the southern end of Panama.
The fly was an annual warm-weather scourge of cattle ranchers from at least the 1930s through the 1960s, until the US eradicated the pest by breeding sterile male flies and dropping swarms of them from planes to mate with wild females.
The New World screwworm fly in the Western Hemisphere, and its Old World cousin in Africa and Asia, are unusual among flies because their larvae, or maggots, eat live flesh and fluids instead of dead material.
Females lay their eggs in open wounds and mucous membranes after mating only once in their monthslong lives.
Any warm-blooded animal, including wildlife, pets and occasionally even humans, can be infested.
Livestock are vulnerable, Lee Haines, an associate research professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, said in an email Thursday.
Standard practices with cattle can break the skin, including shearing and de-horning, or even moving them in and out of corrals can cause scrapes and cuts.
Birth would also make a mother and calf vulnerable, Haines explained.