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The 'Man-Eater' Screwworm Is Coming
After a decades-long campaign to beat the parasites down to Panama, they’re speeding back up north.
The sterile flies proceeded to, well, screw the continent’s wild populations into oblivion, and in 2006, an invisible barrier was established at the Darién Gap, the jungle that straddles the Panama-Colombia border, to cordon the screwworm-free north off from the south. “If the fly spreads further geographically, we will need to reevaluate production capacity.” Several Texas lawmakers recently introduced the STOP Screwworms Act, which directs the USDA to open a new factory, but the whole process could still take years. The USDA supported research by Max Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, to create a male-only strain that could reduce the number of flies needed for dispersal, but funding ended last summer.
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