A Parasite Invasion On Our Southern Border? What You Can Do To Stay Healthy

For 70 years, the United States has been fighting an invasion at our southern border, but its not the invasion of illegal immigrants we are talking about.

The United States has, for 70 years, been fighting a continuous aerial war against the New World screwworm, a parasite that eats animals alive: cow, pig, deer, dog, even human. (Its scientific name, C. hominivorax, translates to “man-eater.”) Larvae of the parasitic fly chew through flesh, transforming small nicks into big, gruesome wounds.

The United States government, to prevent the spread of this deadly parasite, blasted flies with radiation to make them sterile and then began intensive campaign of dropping these sterile flies south of the border:

[the US government] dropped the sterile adult screwworms by the millions—even hundreds of millions—weekly over the U.S., then farther south in Mexico, and eventually in the rest of North America.

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. The barrier, as I observed when I reported from Panama several years ago, consisted of planes releasing millions of sterile screwworms to rain down over the Darién Gap every week. This never-ending battle kept the threat of screwworms far from America.