
America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms - skm
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/
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appleflaxen
This amazing bit from the wikipedia article about the fly:

"The first, and to-date largest, documented infestation of C. hominivorax
myiasis outside of the Americas occurred in North Africa from 1989 to 1991.
The outbreak was traced to a herd of sheep in Libya's Tripoli region, which
began suffering screwworm attacks in July 1989; over the following months, the
myiasis spread rapidly, infecting numerous herds across a 25,000 km2 area.
Eventually, the infested region spanned from the Mediterranean coast to the
Sahara Desert, threatening the more than 2.7 million animals susceptible to C.
hominvorax that inhabited the area. More than 14,000 cases of large-scale
myiasis due to the C. hominivorax species were documented. Traditional control
methods using veterinary assessment and treatment of individual animals were
insufficient to contain the widely dispersed outbreak, so the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization launched a program based on the sterile
insect technique.[10] About 1.26 billion sterile flies were produced in
Mexico, shipped to the infested area, and released to mate with their wild
counterparts. Within months, the C. hominvorax population collapsed; by April
1991, the program had succeeded in eradicating C. hominivorax in the Eastern
Hemisphere. This effort, which cost under US$100 million, was among the most
efficient and successful international animal health programs in UN history."

Incredible!

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia)

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geofft
A little tangential, but having just been in an argument here with someone who
advocated a "nightwatchman state," I wonder what they'd think of the USDA's
efforts here (as well as the other governments'). It seems almost impossible
that this could have been coordinated by private industry alone: while there's
an obvious benefit to the cattle industry, it seems hardly likely that they
would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research that led to
this, let alone successfully negotiated with Panama for the rights to dump
irradiated bugs from coast to coast. Could it have been done?

It's also striking how much these efforts were made _harder_ by US foreign
policy and involvement in the wars of Central America, and are still made hard
because of our poor relationship with Cuba.

~~~
roenxi
> ...it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of
> investment in basic research...

That is the easy part. There is a good model for shared infrastructure - a
private corporation is established, all the local companies buy a share then
the shared company builds, owns and operates the actual infrastructure. The
same thing works for funding long-term research in everyone's best interest. A
shared research corporation that all the local businesses can buy into. They
can be guilted in to a small contribution and the research can happen at a
slow-burn to generate results over time.

To me the bigger challenge is who would pay for dumping large numbers of
irradiated bugs.

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pjc50
But this never happens?

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roenxi
I didn't come up with the idea, I saw it in action in a mining context.

Besides, how you can be sure it does or doesn't happen? The world is large and
complicated; and basic research gets nearly no press and is very hard to
statistically quantify. Where would you look for proof in the positive or
negative?

~~~
eythian
Fonterra, New Zealand's largest company runs along these lines. It's a dairy
company, so basically gets milk from dairy farmers and puts it on the market.
It is a co-op owned by those farmers.

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conistonwater
> _Scientists now knew, from the horrific consequences of atomic bombs dropped
> on Japan, that high doses of radiation damage human tissue and cells. When a
> colleague introduced Knipling to research on the sterilization of other
> flies by radiation, he wondered: Could radiation sterilize screwworms too?_

This is wrong, harmful effects of radiation on cells, that it causes mutations
and makes things sterile, were known long before WW2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discover...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discovery_of_X-
ray_mutagenesis) They basically just put a lot of fruit flies under X-ray
radiation and recorded the effects.

~~~
scandox
Well it's a classic journalistic technique. Put two statements adjacent to
each other and imply a connection but actually you can see there is no formal
conjunction.

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metaphor
I don't follow your logic.

The description " _from the horrific consequences of atomic bombs dropped on
Japan_ " is written and reads as nonessential, meaning it goes without saying
but is nevertheless helpful in qualifying how " _scientists now knew_ " within
context of the article's chronological prose.

I understood the parent's remark as rejecting this factual inaccuracy.

~~~
scandox
There's not much logic in my statement just an understanding of what the
journalist is trying to do: dramatize something quite ordinary.

They want to establish a historical context where Hiroshima was a recent event
and somehow tie this highly dramatic event to the simple fact that scientists
knew radiation damaged cells. But there is no particular connection between
the two since scientists already knew that prior to Hiroshima.

So what's a hack to do? Well you write one sentence. Then you write another.
You don't say "because". You just stick 'em close together. That way you get
your cake (drama) and eat it too (can't be called out on a falsehood).

In this case your brain does the work for them and "joins" these two
statements together. At which point if you know it's false you're aggrieved -
and quite rightly because it is intended as a (mild) deception.

But it passes an editor because you can just say (waving hands) "well you know
it was all happening around that time - I'm just filling in the general
background..."

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dreamcompiler
Great article. Wikipedia page is also interesting.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique)

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totetsu
I was just reading about these drone dispersed little paper balls filled with
parasitic wasp larva used to control corn borer.
[https://altigator.com/organic-agriculture-the-treatment-
of-e...](https://altigator.com/organic-agriculture-the-treatment-of-european-
corn-borer-by-dropping-trichograms-by-drones/)

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josephcsible
I wonder what would happen if instead of releasing sterile male screwworms, we
used the gene drive to release screwworms that could only have male
descendants. I've heard of a similar idea to eradicate malaria by doing that
to mosquitoes.

~~~
jogundas
It seems that the mosquito effort was not a success after all [0].

[0] [https://m.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-
in...](https://m.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-in-
brazil/a-50414340)

~~~
Retric
Different approach, that attempt was to reduce population sizes not cause
extinction. Though it is evidence that Gene Drive is less likely to work than
many expect.

~~~
someguyorother
Nature thwarts gene drives by modifying their targets, so it's important that
whatever is being targeted can't easily change. Surviving instead of being
killed off is certainly an evolutionary advantage, after all :-)

There's been some research on finding targets that can't be mutated. Here's
one example:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245](https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4245)

~~~
josephcsible
While that may be true for general use of the gene drive, doesn't this
particular use significantly increase the fitness of the individual organisms
(despite being harmful to the species as a whole), resulting in essentially no
evolutionary pressure against it?

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marcosdumay
Evolution happens on all levels at the same time. So, while this is the most
likely result, it's not impossible that things go in other ways.

Anyway, it's also very unlikely that those actions result in anything worse
than resistance against those same actions in the future.

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throwanem
I really had no idea the sterile-insect technique worked so well! One wonders,
as was chewed over in a thread a few days ago, why it isn't already being used
at scale to destroy invasive populations of malaria-bearing mosquitoes in sub-
Saharan Africa.

~~~
toyg
Maybe mosquitos mate more than once, making this type of program much less
effective.

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ngcc_hk
Very long essay but very good. it is the same technique they tried to use for
other diseases. Not sure why evolution cannot fight it - female that can
detect sterile male survive.

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benibela
I thought this would be about Carter and the guinea worm

