Wah. Infrastructure costs money. Boo hoo.
If you’d bothered to eradicate the screwworm before it got to this point, you wouldn’t be having this problem.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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The US for years kept the screwworm from spreading back into Panama by maintaining a virtual wall of sterile flies across the Darién Gap, which was a cheap way to protect all of North America.
But then stupid MAGA politics came along, put idiots in charge, and they decided that they'd rather try to protect the Mexico-US border and not give Mexico and Panama the incidental benefit, rather than protecting a smaller border that happened to help other countries. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/we-once-rid-the-us-of-this-nasty-parasite-now-it-could-be-coming-back/ar-AA1DKRSV has some information about how it became a problem again.
That would have meant sending money to countries south of the border far sooner (foreign aid! boo! hiss!!!) and investing in bluesky R&D to identify and prevent pests before they become an industry-shaking crisis (science is a scam! NIH has never done anything useful! just pray harder idiot atheists!).
I guess, on the upside, a massive outbreak north of the Rio Grande would mean a sharp drop off in agricultural carbon and methane emissions.
I just wish it wasn't via such a monstrously painful mechanism.