Why is it "used to be"? I've heard about the program before and thought it was incredible. What happened to it?
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
throwup238 179 days ago [-]
Funding was recently cut but this infestation has been building for years. The key failure that caused this current outbreak was during COVID. The lockdowns shut down both the release flights by the US and the mosquito breeding facilities in Latina America, grinding the whole pest control program to a halt.
timr 179 days ago [-]
From the other link on the front page about this subject [1]:
> Illegal cattle smuggling, long considered one of the most efficient money-laundering routes for the drug cartels which terrorised San Pedro Sula, is regarded as the main reason for the accelerating advance. Up to 800,000 cattle a year are illicitly raised in nature reserves, such as the UNESCO-protected Rio Platano Biosphere in Honduras, and then smuggled by boat and truck up to Mexico. The flies, of course, travel with the livestock, embedded in cattle hides, accelerating their advance.
> “Everything indicates that illegal cattle routes from Central America are the arteries through which the screw worm is circulating again toward Mexico,” wrote Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerican and the Western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a recent paper.
So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics. Meanwhile, I had no idea that cattle smuggling was a money-laundering route for drug cartels. TIL!
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
I follow your intended meaning (USAID & etc cuts). But taken literally it's US policies and propaganda that enable the drug cartels. Our dysfunctions are still ultimately the root of the problem.
timr 179 days ago [-]
OK, so let me be even more explicit: for those who continue to want to connect this to recent changes in the US political system, the relationship is tenuous, at best.
0xDEAFBEAD 179 days ago [-]
The world is complex and interdependent. The US, being a powerful and influential country, has direct or indirect involvement in pretty much everything. That doesn't mean we are to blame for everything.
fc417fc802 179 days ago [-]
I agree. We certainly aren't at fault for the existence of organized crime in general. However our aggressively exported drug policy is very obviously the root that props up the Mexican and South American drug cartels (among others). There's decades of academic literature and economic analysis on this point.
When a parasite is spreading due to a large scale money laundering tactic by a large scale criminal enterprise whose scale is only enabled by our policy I class that as yet another own goal of the war on drugs.
These downstream effects are somewhat non obvious so I think it's worthwhile to point them out when they come up.
wonderwonder 179 days ago [-]
Good thing we are considering approving military force against the cartels. Optimally those large scale criminal enterprises will soon find themselves to be of much smaller scale after we start drone striking them. The cartels are already being hurt by the increased security along our southern borders as well as the large crackdown from Mexican authorities as they seek to appease Trump.
Incredible that we could have been doing this the whole time, we just chose not to. We just chose to allow the cartels to act in whatever way they saw fit and to cross our border with their poison and violence whenever they wanted.
Are you concerned about the possibility that the cartels can strike back with their own drones?
If they do so, what do you feel should be the correct response?
wonderwonder 178 days ago [-]
Absolute overwhelming force where what happened serves as a cautionary tale for generations
fc417fc802 178 days ago [-]
So in other words adopt a policy by which we shoot ourselves in the foot (several times over) and disrupt our neighbors. Double down on said policy by burning lots of cash to provide military assistance to our destabilized neighbor in the form of bombs (we sure do seem to love those). In the event this has negative consequences (ie our own citizens are killed) burn even more cash bombing the perpetrators into the ground (surely this won't result in any collateral damage or ill will).
To me that reads as a convenient step by step guide to undermining our own freedoms while destabilizing our neighbors. Perhaps in turn you'll propose the solution of occupying Mexico to "maintain security"?
Teever 175 days ago [-]
Does America have the economic, social, and industrial resources to wage such warfare with the cartels?
America has spent trillions on two failed wars in the past 25 years, and lacks the economic capability to produce artillery shells to aid Ukraine.
At the same time it needs to build up industrial capacity to defend against an impending war in the pacific and it doesn't seem to be able to do that.
It is unlikely that engaging in all out war with the cartels is a viable path at this time.
Hikikomori 179 days ago [-]
Is there a problem America can't solve with guns?
wonderwonder 179 days ago [-]
I mean taken to its furthest extreme, not really.
America owes its dominance to two things: Guns and Money
And the second is very much dependent on the first.
bloomingeek 179 days ago [-]
> So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics.
Right now, as the world turns, we have the greatest number of appointees in positions of governmental influence on policies, that have no idea what they are doing because of a lack of expertise. Almost all these vital positions are politically appointed by the current administration. Need an example: soon the policies of JFK jr., God help us, are going to, unfortunately, prove my point.
macintux 179 days ago [-]
Yeah, the way we’re turning our backs on one of the most important medical miracles in recent years is horrifying. I hope COVID or something worse doesn’t cause too much carnage.
Noumenon72 179 days ago [-]
Someone must have decided they weren't "essential". Big mistake.
footlose_3815 179 days ago [-]
Twice
andsoitis 179 days ago [-]
Not essential. We can eat less beef. Better for health, the environment.
Numerlor 179 days ago [-]
Screwworm also infects wildlife and occasionally humans, it's really not something you want to have in the area if you can help it
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors [1] which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 228 local run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players each generating around $500M-2B in revenue.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the value this train of thought can have in 2026 and 2028.
84% of Americans consume dairy or dairy alternative (still synthesized using dairy) products [2] - don't make this yet another culture war topic
>India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle
That's a tad misleading. The statistics I could find only says that India outproduces the US in dairy, not beef. Rounding
>yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0]
I did a cursory search in your source for "carbon" and "methane" and couldn't find anything to back this claim, only vague claims about how India does "Regenerative farming" and is therefore "low methane".
>because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
That's not scalable and only works because the country is poor and beef/dairy consumption isn't high. There's no way you can supply American level demand for beef/dairy by only using crop residue.
>American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
You can easily tell an opposite story about how consolidate companies have bigger budgets for R&D and capital projects, as opposed to 26 cooperatives each trying to implement some sort of strategy.
mahirsaid 179 days ago [-]
Regardless, it's terrible to have around you. Your dog will have it too if let be. they do need to be controlled if it gets out of hand. Better now than when its a bigger problem.
ajmurmann 178 days ago [-]
Could I start a processor today and disrupt them? (Real question, I know almost noting and meat processing)
alephnerd 177 days ago [-]
Nope. These are organizations that can generate multi-billion dollar revenues, and could outcompete based on investment capacity alone.
kristjansson 179 days ago [-]
And we should encourage that by leveraging the response to a natural disaster to advance your particular policy goals?
ben_w 179 days ago [-]
While I am a vegetarian and thus am an existence proof, there's multiple different ways in which something can be "essential".
Anyone going "let's stop a thing today which will messes with a non-trivial fraction of our food production in a few years' time, without preparing either that food sector nor the dietary choices of the consumers before that happens" is definitely making a high-risk strategic choice.
SoftTalker 179 days ago [-]
Already happening. Beef is rapidly becomming unaffordable. A steak at the supermarket is >$20. Can't imagine what they cost at a restaurant. I've switched to mostly turkey, chicken, and pork.
alephnerd 179 days ago [-]
That's due to issues around monopolization in the Dairy and Cattle industry in the US [1].
70% of all processors in the dairy and cattle industry are now owned by 3 companies. Processors don't own cattle - they just process raw material like dairy and meat into cheese and pasteurized milk and handle the entire supply chain. But because they control the supply chain, distribution, and even the feed [0] used they can set rates and vendors used by farmers.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
This isn't true in Canada and we're seeing as big of price increases for beef, greater than the US for ground beef. This is a supply issue while demand has increased. Drought and costs have also impacted herd size
HillRat 179 days ago [-]
Packer and ag consolidation is a huge problem, but the underlying issue here is climate change and long-lasting droughts; some of the issues with herd size — the smallest since about 1950 — come from COVID hangover when cows weren’t getting processed and price-per-head plummeted, but the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed. We’re looking at long-term cost trends that are unlikely to reverse or even be significantly ameliorated anytime soon.
alephnerd 179 days ago [-]
> the immediate problem is that ranchers can’t support large herds due to lack of rain and cost of feed
Ranchers that can support large herds (2,000+) are those who earn a net profit [0] and are consolidating because processors do not want to support small farms.
While environmental factors do play a role, saying it's the primary reason is greenwashing of the real oligopolies tendencies arising in American Ag industry.
Is this supported by the data? During the pandemic people were also blaming "monopolization" or "consolidation" for the rise in grocery prices, but in reality the margins of publicly traded supermarket companies went up by a percentage point or two.
jncfhnb 179 days ago [-]
Profit margin increasing by a percentage point on a low margin business is potentially significant
gruez 179 days ago [-]
It's certainly meaningful for the company involved, but a 1% increase in grocer margins means a $100 grocery bill becomes $101. It's at best an incomplete explanation for the ~20% price increase on grocery prices between 2021 and 2023.
alephnerd 179 days ago [-]
Yep. To quote The Bullvine [0] (Axios for the cattle and dairy industry):
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
Also [1]
-----------
The fact that a country like India can support 228 milk cooperatives each generating around $500M-2B in revenue and outcompete American dairy+cattle in production and even reducing environmental impact with marginal subsidizes [2] means distribution+processing consolidation and it's side effects (cattle monoculture, non-competitive prices given to farmers, dairy processers NOW becoming animal feed manufacturers) are a good example of market failures due to oligopolic control.
No one at the WI and MI state Dem level is chatting about this based on some of my own meeting with them recently. This is the kind of swing vote topic that can flip all 3 branches of government in 26 and 28.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the opportunity this provides. 84% of Americans consume dairy and dairy products [3] - this is an easy win if some sympathy was provided.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
Market failures due to oligarchic control is the natural end state of capitalism. Everything is going as intended, the point of the system is to produce oligarchs, not efficient markets.
alephnerd 179 days ago [-]
Not necessarily.
It is mainstream economic and political opinion to regulate in some manner to reduce market consolidation since the 1940s with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index.
ModernMech 179 days ago [-]
I think necessarily. I don’t think it’s possible to devise a capitalist system that doesn’t devolve into oligarchic control. Markets can’t be regulated like the theory wants, because capitalists just use their wealth to take over the politicians. They are able to do this because they control so much wealth. To prevent this hack, you’d have to take control of capital away from the capitalists, thus defeating the core idea of capitalism.
chrisweekly 179 days ago [-]
> "capital away from the capitalists"
or find other ways to reduce the influence of money on public elections -- see eg Prof. Lessig (of "Creative Commons" fame) and his writings on "Fix Congress First" which led to Rootstrikers.org
rcpt 179 days ago [-]
Lina Khan was in power for years and didn't do anything about this.
Closest thing was a case where she blocked Sanderson Farms from being acquired but that was poultry.
alephnerd 179 days ago [-]
She was starting to concentrate on the Ag consolidation [0] but my interpretation is she targeted tech first due to the industry's somewhat weaker political position in both admins.
She also didn't touch Comcast - and they are the kingmakers in PA and DE.
Yes going after tech is the populist thing to do and she did that.
As usual Comcast never gets touched and farm owners might as well write the laws themselves.
gruez 179 days ago [-]
By "data" I was referring to data to support the claim that consolidation led to increase in prices (eg. margin expansion), not that consolidation was happening at all. It's the same with supermarkets. There's no doubt that consolidation was happening, and there's even evidence that it led to higher prices, but the absolute effect on grocery bills seems to be marginal.
throwup238 179 days ago [-]
Maybe for a USDA Prime ribeye or tenderloin at Bristol Farms or something.
If you go to an ethnic store like Arabic halaal markets, ribeye steaks can be had for less than $10 a pound (but they’re ungraded). In one of the highest CoL areas in Southern California. Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are $20/pound and ribeye rounds are $25/pound.
HDThoreaun 179 days ago [-]
Im still getting outer skirt for $8 a pound at my grocery. Seems pretty affordable to me
genghisjahn 179 days ago [-]
I get great cuts of steak for less than $10 all the time.
Screwworms will also infect humans, with horrific and potentially fatal consequences.
lazide 179 days ago [-]
Screwworms will eat people too, if allowed to. You really don’t want them in your area.
FpUser 179 days ago [-]
>"Not essential. We can eat less beef. Better for health, the environment."
We can also live in a cave, better for the environment.
f1shy 179 days ago [-]
Or just dissapear (which btw, no joking, is what some people propose)
spamizbad 179 days ago [-]
I guess nature is “finding a way” after all…
raverbashing 179 days ago [-]
Funny, you don't seem to have beef with the worm eating beef
But it can and does infect humans and other animals
AlecSchueler 179 days ago [-]
They didn't say they had beef with anyone eating beef.
artursapek 179 days ago [-]
125lb take
VaderLied 179 days ago [-]
[dead]
delfinom 179 days ago [-]
The funding was never cut. That was misinfo spread by morons because there was a typical Trump dispute of "mexico will pay for it". But the reality was that was in talks of a Mexico specific coverage program. The Panama program was never touched and is run by a third party agency with stakes holders consisting of the USDA and Panama government.
But yes the current outbreak built up since COVID.
fc417fc802 179 days ago [-]
So funding was never cut, but actually some subset did experience cuts? Which is it?
We're taking about Mexico to US trade here so the Mexico specific subprogram seems directly relevant.
throwaway5752 179 days ago [-]
Question, are they morons? Is your disagreement with them really that simple? Was it necessary to call them that? I don't like posting this comment, because it will be distracting and tone policing. I was just going to downvote and flag your comment and move on, but I think you offered some valuable information about the policy and I'd like to hear more without the divisive parts that add less value.
GeekyBear 179 days ago [-]
> Why is it "used to be"?
> Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia.
However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.
> Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
tomrod 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ajmurmann 179 days ago [-]
I have no idea. It certainly seems insanely careless to me to defund something like this but I haven't found anything in my brief research that gives me an idea of the impact. Intuitively I'd expect that to show up in the data a little later (assuming that data is still being collected)
cogman10 179 days ago [-]
DOGE. It was ran by USAID.
VladVladikoff 179 days ago [-]
It was failing long before this. The border used to be down by Panama.
smallmancontrov 179 days ago [-]
The border didn't magically eradicate the flies on one side. Pushing the border down to the Darien Gap took work, but we did it before and can do it again. The real problem is the gleeful destruction of government capacity to do things like this.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
Yes, that's true, but the point the parent commenter was making is that recent previous administrations also didn't take this problem seriously.
smallmancontrov 179 days ago [-]
Who was president in 2020 again?
stretchwithme 179 days ago [-]
I see you are bias-free.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
You get that there was a president between 2020 and now, right? Nobody is sticking up for Trump; they're just saying, this particular bad thing isn't a DOGE outcome.
179 days ago [-]
chris_wot 179 days ago [-]
If this particular bad thing was bad before DOGE, then it’s far worse under DOGE. It’s a particularly ridiculous argument.
b112 179 days ago [-]
Knowing how and why a thing happened, is far more important than political grandstanding.
The doge cuts may affect the future of this program, but have absolutely positively nothing to do with the situation now. Nothing. Not a thing.
It is fine to say doge will make this neglect worse, but the neglect happened for a decade.
And that's important. That's vital to understanding why, and how it happened.
And that is absolutely not a ridiculous concept.
hedora 179 days ago [-]
They cut funding in March in the middle of it beginning to spread north, and the spread has continued uncontrolled in the months since then.
The DOGE cuts directly worsened the current situation. It’s unclear if the initial covid era cuts were performed by Biden or Trump (I can’t find a date or primary source for those).
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
I don't know about "not a thing"; have to be careful about overcorrecting the other direction. The thing I'm wary about is just shutting down discussion of complicated things as soon as Trump appears. The screwworm situation is interesting!
179 days ago [-]
cogman10 179 days ago [-]
The first sign of spread past panama was seen in Nov 2024. Parasites can spread fast and the US/Mexico needed to react fast to the fact that it spread past panama.
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
literalAardvark 179 days ago [-]
It wasn't a critical time, it was late.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
asacrowflies 179 days ago [-]
Late is still a critical time...perhaps more critical.
cogman10 179 days ago [-]
Fair point.
The cost to fight this back will definitely exponentially increase.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
Ok, but where did you get that Nov '24 date from? You just agreed with a comment that falsified that claim.
cogman10 179 days ago [-]
An article I read mentioned that Nov '24 is when the flies were spotted in Mexico. I incorrectly assumed that meant that is when they breached the panama boarder.
So I agree with the commenter that falsified my claim because they are correct, the date of breach was earlier and the time to react was then.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
Gotcha. Thanks! I was just curious.
rdl 179 days ago [-]
And the Panama border (Darien Gap, specifically) used to be a stronger natural barrier; humans have been crossing it for years, are starting to graze cows within the exclusion zone, etc.
smallmancontrov 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mindslight 179 days ago [-]
Musk certainly shares responsibility, but focusing responsibility on him lets others escape blame - eg Trump, Congress, the corpo and individual edgelord enablers sanguine about chaos, etc.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, he could have actually done something politically on his own, and yet he still ends up being used as a useful idiot scapegoat by a con artist. "But Trump promised he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
treetalker 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
JKCalhoun 179 days ago [-]
Great (gross) video from the Department of Energy (1960) on how the screwworm was defeated: https://youtu.be/QFoOnS6CWSI
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
guerrilla 179 days ago [-]
> Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue.
What assholes. :(
lazide 179 days ago [-]
Yeah the switch on these guys was definitely flipped to ‘evil’
mc32 179 days ago [-]
The key to managing this pest [edit: after it breaches the isthmus program] is through active monitoring, treating infested wounds as well as conducting castration and dehorning in less active months. It’s not like cattle herds didn’t exist prior to the 1950s.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
That's in fact not how screwworms are managed; the "border" of screwworm prevalence was managed by spreading sterilized male screwworms.
mc32 179 days ago [-]
That’s how we manage them now. I mean before we had that program, we dealt with the pest/infestation that way and we can in the future too if need be to combat what’s getting through. Obviously neutralizing them down in the isthmus is preferred but we’re seeing them come up from Mexico now. So if you have a minor infestation that’s how you treat it to address whatever gets missed by the sterilization program.
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to the pest.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
The whole reason this is newsworthy is that the system we had prior to eradication was not good.
mc32 179 days ago [-]
Yes, obviously; but it’s not the end of the cattle industry as some make it out to be.
To clarify: it was never eradicated. It’s been actively managed and kept at bay. Now it’s punching through some holes.
tptacek 179 days ago [-]
Because we stopped doing the thing that works. Your earlier point, that we can just as easily return to herd management strategies, was wrong.
mc32 179 days ago [-]
What did we stop doing? The sterilization program is ongoing.
There are always periodic outbreaks in Central America and Mexico. The current one started in 2023.
One common vector is illegal cattle trafficking.
grej 179 days ago [-]
The US successfully eradicated screwworms here in 1966 with a brilliant integrated sterile insect technique - I think the very first use of it (and had previously funded helping other countries control it also). But if we had another outbreak spread, I doubt there's any shred of competence left in this current gutted federal government to do anything like that again. Maybe they can have the new ICE folks try to deport the screwworm flies.
jfengel 179 days ago [-]
They announced funding to do it again, back in June. But I have no idea if there's anyone around to pay.
Whether your meat comes form South America or the US or the EU, always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face. There are thousands of types of dangerous larvae that can infect via the eyes rubbing the eyes or the nose picking ones nose when handling raw meats and vegetables. Cutting meat slices thinner and cooking them well kills larvae. Marinating meats with something that contains acetic acid also helps. Stomach acid takes care of the rest.
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
Aurornis 179 days ago [-]
> I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
Food safety with raw meets isn’t really going against the agenda.
renewiltord 179 days ago [-]
What's with everyone saying they know some secret that everyone else is trying to suppress?
Is it just that we all spend time in our bubble and take that to other groups?
I don't even know what agenda he's going against by saying one should be careful around raw meat. Who's on the other side of this?
f1shy 179 days ago [-]
I have had lots of discussions with people who insist in eating all raw. I have been in a restaurant where a teenager ordered a raw beef right beaid us. Made me sick just of seeing, feeling the raw meat smell, and hearing the chewing.
I have seen enough “chefs” handling raw meat in tv, putting it literally seconds in heat, and basically eating raw. There is no agenda, but I do see a trend.
1718627440 179 days ago [-]
I thought not eating raw meat was more of an US thing, here in Europe/Germany there are some dishes that consists of raw meat, and that doesn't mean heated for seconds. Guess that's why we also have stricter hygiene rules.
belter 179 days ago [-]
The french steak tartare is very common in France, in many corporate canteen.
orwin 179 days ago [-]
'tartare' you see in corporate canteen (and a lot of restaurants sadly) are from Metro, and are absolutely safe: after being cut, it's flash-freezed in its can, and the can is only opened seconds before the meat is prepared, minutes before being served.
They're not really good, but they're safe.
wahnfrieden 179 days ago [-]
The shock of it is gamed for TikTok and Reels virality
sejje 179 days ago [-]
He's so effectively standing alone that nobody dare stand against him.
f1shy 179 days ago [-]
>> always wear gloves when handling raw meats and don't touch your face.
Ecoli alone should be enough to be careful with handling raw meats (of any animal) and of course the worms and other things. Specially if you have ANY wounds, small as they are, if e.g. lemon juice burns, is an open wound.
Also meat should be cooked properly. Lately seems to be kind of hype, almost a competition, who eats the rawer meat. 5 star chefs are pushing more and more red, even I have seen “chefs” simply literally laying meat for 5 seconds. The texture is gummy, taste horrible, and just dangerous.
1718627440 179 days ago [-]
That won't help your costumers that eat the raw meat you prepared, you still need to have proper hygiene in the complete food chain.
xipho 179 days ago [-]
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.
This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.
Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
zwnow 179 days ago [-]
I highly doubt big pharma will intervene. Humans only care about the foreseeable future. Our interest and actions regarding climate change shows that openly to each and everyone of us.
xipho 179 days ago [-]
Big pharma will intervene when they realize that life is one big chemistry experiment, and it's running longer than any lab has. AI to predict, nature to produce, then you need to figure out how nature produced. Understanding the pathways in nature -> quicker time to product.
paulcole 179 days ago [-]
In what is it “asynchronous”?
xipho 179 days ago [-]
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
bspammer 179 days ago [-]
I'm sure they meant asymmetrical
cogman10 179 days ago [-]
USAID was in charge of the program which monitored screwworm spread in central and south america. The way you combat screwworm is by releasing sterile male flies in screwworm outbreak areas.
LMYahooTFY 179 days ago [-]
Do you have a source? Because this appears to be false. I can't find anything indicating it was funded by USAID.
Everything I'm reading says it has been funded by USDA, and in fact funding has been significantly increased during 2025.
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
nnutter 179 days ago [-]
I appreciate you citing the USAID funding but you seem to be trying to prove a point rather than get to the truth. Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown, USDA is actively working on it, one can see this by going to usda.gov and searching for "screwworm". I really appreciate ajmurmann's edit which acknowledges this.
> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"
DangitBobby 179 days ago [-]
This was downvoted because...?
bryant 178 days ago [-]
I misspelled "defunded" so that could be why.
I tease. Folks have strong opinions on the topic.
mkoubaa 179 days ago [-]
I don't see why a trade group of affected industries can't collectively fund this
I was wondering where i heard the term screwworm before!
erredois 179 days ago [-]
Coming from a family that has cattle and dairy cows in south eastern Brazil, where screwworm is endemic, I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US. After some research it appears it affects more climates that are always hot and humid, and big operations where the animals are not being checked frequently. Also the handling at the 60s was probably much worse than modern techniques for avoiding animals being hurt and treating when they are infected.
Aurornis 179 days ago [-]
> I was surprised when I listened to a podcast about screwworm, and some of the descriptions about how huge the problem was in the US.
It’s not a huge problem in the US. We eradicated screwworm in the 60s.
We are trying very hard to keep it out. The US normally works very hard to monitor and prevent these situations in trade partners.
Was is past tense, indicating a historical problem, not a current one.
179 days ago [-]
Glyptodon 179 days ago [-]
One more thing where we're going back in time. Sure seems like a new decline and fall is coming bit by bit.
amoshebb 179 days ago [-]
Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
throwup238 179 days ago [-]
There is no finishing the job. Screwworm flies have tons of reservoirs in the jungles of Central America that aren’t practical to eliminate for logistical and ecological reasons. We can only control the population in agriculturally important areas by constantly releasing the sterile male flies every year. Whenever we stop the releases, the flies bounce back in a few years.
rdl 179 days ago [-]
The durable reservoirs are in South America, not Central America. We actually eradicated it (at least essentially) all the way down to the Darien Gap.
amoshebb 179 days ago [-]
See I guess I find broadside “impractical” dissatisfying.
Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.
jeff_lee 179 days ago [-]
Feels like we had the cure in our hands and just let the disease walk back in.
db48x 179 days ago [-]
The “cure” is an unceasing war. Then COVID hit and the war ceased for a few months.
Eextra953 179 days ago [-]
So with pests and viruses there is no real eradication? Do they really require an unceasing war to reign them in? I have no knowledge of this field - just curious.
hotep99 179 days ago [-]
Screwworms could probably be eradicated in theory but it would require spreading the sterile fly program to the entirety of the Americas which isn't going to happen. There would always be a pocket somewhere in the Amazon of fertile flies so it isn't really viable. The point of stopping them at the Darien Gap was that there was a geographically small area where their spread could be halted from entering Central and North America and re-establishing themselves.
db48x 179 days ago [-]
It depends on the pest. Some of them are easier to eliminate than others. With screwworm flies the only offense we have is to raise them by the billions, sterilize them with radiation, chill them down, and then drop them out of airplanes. Fertile females end up mating with sterile males and then cannot lay any eggs before they die. Each generation then becomes radically smaller than the previous. Since their lifecycle is only a few weeks long this eliminates them in a few months. They were able to successfully eradicate the screwworm fly from North and Central America, but a combination of expense and diplomatic entanglements prevented them from continuing south past Panama. There have been outbreaks before, most notably in Egypt (or maybe just northern Africa, I forget) a few decades ago.
We have different responses to other pests. For example, Florida maintains a mosquito control program that sprays vast swathes of the state with insecticide from both the ground and the air every 7 days. I imagine that other southern states do as well.
thfuran 179 days ago [-]
Rinderpest (a cattle disease) and Smallpox are the only two diseases ever successfully eradicated. The smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine ever invented and it took until 1980, about 180 years later, to eradicate the disease entirely. It pretty much is an unceasing war, though Guinea worm and polio are also relatively close to being eradicated. But if you stop fighting them, they'll just spread again.
mistyvales 179 days ago [-]
Didn't they pull funding for mitigation programs regarding this? Or was that rescinded?
ethan_smith 179 days ago [-]
Yes, the USDA-APHIS Screwworm Barrier Maintenance Program had its funding reduced by 30% in the 2024 budget, which significantly impacted sterile fly production capacity at the Panama facility.
Panoramix 179 days ago [-]
citation?
USDA approved an emergency funding of 165 million in 2024 for this issue
> This is maintained with stringent animal movement controls, surveillance, trapping, and following the proven science to push the NWS barrier south in phases as quickly as possible.
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
duskwuff 179 days ago [-]
> Why add "proven" before science?
I'm pretty sure it's a political thing, and is meant to be read as "don't worry, we aren't using any problematic science like mRNA vaccines".
179 days ago [-]
chris_wot 179 days ago [-]
America put a large tariff on Australian beef. We don’t have this.
Guess you all like eating expensive beef.
179 days ago [-]
guhcampos 179 days ago [-]
I think mr Trump will have to seriously rethink the 50% tariff he put on our (Brazilian) meat imports then. Interesting.
sparrish 179 days ago [-]
Yeah, cause you guys don't have screw worms in Brazil? It's likely the screw worms in Mexico now came from Brazil.
zeagle 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hobs 179 days ago [-]
Well, if destroying things that have only positive outcomes for your constituents is not dysfunction then what is?
jfengel 179 days ago [-]
It's not dysfunction if the function was to harm other people. If there happens to be a bit of blowback, well, I'm sure it was worth it.
icy 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
kriops 179 days ago [-]
(Implied) invalid generalization, or confirmation bias. This is a good reason to not eat that particular meat. In general, however, meat is an S-tier source of nutrition, vitamins, and minerals.
progbits 179 days ago [-]
How can something which is horribly inefficient for environment (water use, land use, greenhouse emissions from fertilizer) possibly be S tier?
kriops 179 days ago [-]
What a weird question, if it was at all genuine. Not only is it not inefficient but, e.g., cows are absolutely unique and amazing for their ability to digest, e.g., grass into something that is highly nutritiously desirable for humans.
What you say is maybe true but irrelevant. We don't have to grow grass.
HDThoreaun 179 days ago [-]
Crappy grass is the only thing that grows in the upper plains because there isnt any water.
kriops 179 days ago [-]
Asserting ruminants are “irrelevant” tells me nobody should take you seriously on this topic. Replicating their function is the problem to solve if you ever want to make the case you think you are making.
179 days ago [-]
tomxor 179 days ago [-]
Meat especially grass fed beef, is not just protein, it's an incredibly dense source of nutritients. You have to eat far higher quantities and ranges of plant based alternatives to acquire the same nutritional value, and they are usually less bioavailable. So from the perspective of the person consuming it, it's very efficient source of nutrients, and also the most satiating food you can eat, so you won't feel the urge to overeat.
Abstractly, using land for crops is around an order of magnitude more efficient when considering only calories per unit area, but when considering the total system i.e the humans consuming it, there's an argument to be had that more livestock could be more efficient when considering all the side effects of a huge population of malnourished humans overeating refined hyper-paletable carbs.
For either side of this argument, the real issue is industrial agriculture producing both crops and livestock in unsustainable and nutritionally devoid ways, that are incredibly bad for the environment and humans consuming it.
VladVladikoff 179 days ago [-]
Biodiverse farms with animals and plants, rotating crop fields, are far more ecologically friendly than pure plant farms.
jaian 179 days ago [-]
Because that's not what we are talking about.
Pxtl 179 days ago [-]
Food that eats food isn't ever gonna be good thermodynamics.
jolmg 179 days ago [-]
Calories isn't the only thing that's needed from food.
burnt-resistor 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 179 days ago [-]
You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously in many different threads. If you keep this up, we're going to ban you.
Don't worry about it. We'll all be allergic to meat eventually thanks to that tick.
inetknght 179 days ago [-]
Plenty of pests affect crops too.
burnt-resistor 179 days ago [-]
(Blue dot in hill country TX here.)
Yep. I hear that.
<saturday-soap-box>
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
</saturday-soap-box>
edot 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
soulofmischief 179 days ago [-]
As a non-meat eater I've gotten used to how riled up and defensive people get over the mere suggestion that eating meat in today's industrialized society comes at an ecological and economic cost that we can't afford in the long run. I find much better luck engaging people by suggesting reduced consumption of meat vs. total abstinence.
echelon 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
righthand 179 days ago [-]
Laws and regulation didn’t evolve from mother nature, so we should start killing each other because it’s natural?
Or it’s only natural when a non-human species is killed off by another species?
zahlman 179 days ago [-]
> edit: I'm not going to respond to each individual reply calling me a fascist or relating eating to rape or slavery
You should not reply to any of them, but just flag them, honestly.
tupac_speedrap 179 days ago [-]
Lovely platitudes but "nature" stops being abstract once it is happening to you, we are talking about mammals being eaten alive here, so that could be you, your family, your pets, cattle...etc. Of course people are going to react to that.
wizzwizz4 179 days ago [-]
Yes? Horrific things don't stop being horrific, just because they're the status quo. (But this is wildly off-topic.)
burnt-resistor 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
croes 179 days ago [-]
By that logic you could argue rape is just nature too.
At some point mankind added moral.
delichon 179 days ago [-]
Of course rape is natural. Orangutans, ducks, geese, and certain dolphin species also rape. That's a problem if you think "natural" justifies human behavior, but why would it?
croes 179 days ago [-]
Read the edit of parent.
And I wrote „just nature“ because parent used it’s nature as a justification.
Hence the moral part.
echelon 179 days ago [-]
We evolved to eat. We did not evolve to rape.
Eating, fundamentally, reduces some other organism's population. All of nature does it.
We consume life and the byproducts of life. Even the high energy gas exchange we rely upon is 100% a waste product that we consume.
Life is fundamentally about consuming and repurposing the materials of others.
You don't need to have sex. You need to eat to survive.
Our bodies are naturally adapted to consume wildlife. It is the most natural state for our body plan and biochemistry.
Our body cannot make all of the amino acids and metabolites it needs to be healthy. If technology and food fortification vanished one day, we would be forced to eat meat to survive. Non-meat diets are only enabled by technology. Without it, we would not even be having this discussion.
croes 179 days ago [-]
Your word analogy is wrong.
It‘s not eat : rape, it‘s eat: fuck, so for some the equivalent for rape is eating meat or more specific killing animal : rape.
We evolved to eat and we evolved to fuck.
But like sex doesn’t mean rape so does eating not necessarily mean meat or at least no much and not without consideration who the animal is raised before we kill and eat it.
A long time in many societies we didn’t really care what women felt during sex or if they were even willing to.
But we evolved further and learned women have the same rights as men and rape is a bad thing. We even redefined what is considered rape. It’s not that long ago that raping your wife was impossible from a legal point of view.
We also changed our view on factorial farming, at least many of us. At least we want meat from a happy cow that lived on the pasture and not penned up in the barn without sunshine. The next step isn’t that far, no animal should be killed if nutrition is possible otherwise. We already spare some animals as food. In the west it’s cats and dogs, in India cows. And some include all animals in the don‘t eat category.
croes 179 days ago [-]
You could also say we evolved to lie but nowadays it’s considered a bad habit.
The crucial point is the morals of society.
Being has was once a sin, now nit so much at least in the western world even if some try to turn that back.
We also evolved to kill especially with weapons because our natural one aren’t that great. We kill lots of other humans, of course the evil one is always the other side because killing is bad nevertheless we evolved to do quite effectively.
Evolution is a explanation not an justification.
hombre_fatal 179 days ago [-]
None of that really matters if you just care about nutrition or sentient beings without the story telling.
burnt-resistor 179 days ago [-]
[flagged]
iamacyborg 179 days ago [-]
Really? All year? In this current political climate?
croes 179 days ago [-]
To be fair, we don’t know what they read this year.
thrown-0825 179 days ago [-]
I assumed this was a computer virus affecting an exchange based on it being at the top of HN.
Pxtl 179 days ago [-]
This was literally one of the first North American disasters I saw predicted as falling out of the Doge cuts.
Eextra953 179 days ago [-]
Any other predictions you saw/see coming? I feel like it would be useful to collect all of the predictions from people with domain knowledge and then build a website to track them all. Whether or not they happen, who knows, but being able to track them should be a big help in building a narrative of what is really happening vs media narratives that are hyper localized in time and often do a terrible job of explaining the long history of events.
delfinom 179 days ago [-]
This predates the DOGE cuts. During COVID and afterwards smuggling of cattle across from South America into Central America basically went full tilt and is considered the reason why the program collapsed.
The barrier failure happened last year due to covid related supply chain issues that eventually reached the end of the bullwhip and was announced then.
Rendered at 21:01:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/3sD9d
Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
> Illegal cattle smuggling, long considered one of the most efficient money-laundering routes for the drug cartels which terrorised San Pedro Sula, is regarded as the main reason for the accelerating advance. Up to 800,000 cattle a year are illicitly raised in nature reserves, such as the UNESCO-protected Rio Platano Biosphere in Honduras, and then smuggled by boat and truck up to Mexico. The flies, of course, travel with the livestock, embedded in cattle hides, accelerating their advance.
> “Everything indicates that illegal cattle routes from Central America are the arteries through which the screw worm is circulating again toward Mexico,” wrote Jeremy Radachowsky, director for Mesoamerican and the Western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in a recent paper.
So for those who keep trying to make the connection, it has little, if anything, to do with US politics. Meanwhile, I had no idea that cattle smuggling was a money-laundering route for drug cartels. TIL!
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
I follow your intended meaning (USAID & etc cuts). But taken literally it's US policies and propaganda that enable the drug cartels. Our dysfunctions are still ultimately the root of the problem.
When a parasite is spreading due to a large scale money laundering tactic by a large scale criminal enterprise whose scale is only enabled by our policy I class that as yet another own goal of the war on drugs.
These downstream effects are somewhat non obvious so I think it's worthwhile to point them out when they come up.
Incredible that we could have been doing this the whole time, we just chose not to. We just chose to allow the cartels to act in whatever way they saw fit and to cross our border with their poison and violence whenever they wanted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/world/americas/mexico-car...
If they do so, what do you feel should be the correct response?
To me that reads as a convenient step by step guide to undermining our own freedoms while destabilizing our neighbors. Perhaps in turn you'll propose the solution of occupying Mexico to "maintain security"?
America has spent trillions on two failed wars in the past 25 years, and lacks the economic capability to produce artillery shells to aid Ukraine.
At the same time it needs to build up industrial capacity to defend against an impending war in the pacific and it doesn't seem to be able to do that.
It is unlikely that engaging in all out war with the cartels is a viable path at this time.
America owes its dominance to two things: Guns and Money
And the second is very much dependent on the first.
Right now, as the world turns, we have the greatest number of appointees in positions of governmental influence on policies, that have no idea what they are doing because of a lack of expertise. Almost all these vital positions are politically appointed by the current administration. Need an example: soon the policies of JFK jr., God help us, are going to, unfortunately, prove my point.
India has an equally large cattle industry that outproduces American dairy and cattle, yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0] because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors [1] which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 228 local run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players each generating around $500M-2B in revenue.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the value this train of thought can have in 2026 and 2028.
84% of Americans consume dairy or dairy alternative (still synthesized using dairy) products [2] - don't make this yet another culture war topic
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
[2] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
That's a tad misleading. The statistics I could find only says that India outproduces the US in dairy, not beef. Rounding
>yet their industry has a fraction of the carbon and methane impact as American dairy and cattle rearing [0]
I did a cursory search in your source for "carbon" and "methane" and couldn't find anything to back this claim, only vague claims about how India does "Regenerative farming" and is therefore "low methane".
>because the feed used in Indian industry is crop residue instead of industrialized meat+grain mixtures.
That's not scalable and only works because the country is poor and beef/dairy consumption isn't high. There's no way you can supply American level demand for beef/dairy by only using crop residue.
>American Ag is hyperconsolidated into 3 processors which makes it difficult for innovations to develop, whereas an equally large country like India has 26 state run dairy cooperatives and multiple private sector players.
You can easily tell an opposite story about how consolidate companies have bigger budgets for R&D and capital projects, as opposed to 26 cooperatives each trying to implement some sort of strategy.
Anyone going "let's stop a thing today which will messes with a non-trivial fraction of our food production in a few years' time, without preparing either that food sector nor the dietary choices of the consumers before that happens" is definitely making a high-risk strategic choice.
70% of all processors in the dairy and cattle industry are now owned by 3 companies. Processors don't own cattle - they just process raw material like dairy and meat into cheese and pasteurized milk and handle the entire supply chain. But because they control the supply chain, distribution, and even the feed [0] used they can set rates and vendors used by farmers.
I posted an article about this earlier on HN, but it seems HNers like to talk about antitrust for search engines and not dairy and beef production.
Antitrust for me, oligopolic market forces for thee.
[0] - https://www.landolakesinc.com/what-we-do/animal-nutrition/
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
___________
To u/andrew_lettuce below:
Canada has the exact same issue of processor consolidation and oligopoly in agriculture as the US [0][1][2]
Arguably, it's worse than the US because this process started in the 1990s in Canada [3] versus the 2010s in the US.
[0] - https://ca.rbcwealthmanagement.com/terrence-galarneau/blog/4...
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7350140/
[2] - https://financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/why-only-t...
[3] - https://www.eap.mcgill.ca/MagRack/RH/RH_E_97_05.htm
Ranchers that can support large herds (2,000+) are those who earn a net profit [0] and are consolidating because processors do not want to support small farms.
While environmental factors do play a role, saying it's the primary reason is greenwashing of the real oligopolies tendencies arising in American Ag industry.
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.
These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.
I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”
This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"
Also [1]
-----------
The fact that a country like India can support 228 milk cooperatives each generating around $500M-2B in revenue and outcompete American dairy+cattle in production and even reducing environmental impact with marginal subsidizes [2] means distribution+processing consolidation and it's side effects (cattle monoculture, non-competitive prices given to farmers, dairy processers NOW becoming animal feed manufacturers) are a good example of market failures due to oligopolic control.
No one at the WI and MI state Dem level is chatting about this based on some of my own meeting with them recently. This is the kind of swing vote topic that can flip all 3 branches of government in 26 and 28.
If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the opportunity this provides. 84% of Americans consume dairy and dairy products [3] - this is an easy win if some sympathy was provided.
Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.
[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/dairys-great-cons...
[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...
[2] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...
[3] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
It is mainstream economic and political opinion to regulate in some manner to reduce market consolidation since the 1940s with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index.
or find other ways to reduce the influence of money on public elections -- see eg Prof. Lessig (of "Creative Commons" fame) and his writings on "Fix Congress First" which led to Rootstrikers.org
Closest thing was a case where she blocked Sanderson Farms from being acquired but that was poultry.
She also didn't touch Comcast - and they are the kingmakers in PA and DE.
[0] - https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/katzmann-lecture-lina-khan-talk...
As usual Comcast never gets touched and farm owners might as well write the laws themselves.
If you go to an ethnic store like Arabic halaal markets, ribeye steaks can be had for less than $10 a pound (but they’re ungraded). In one of the highest CoL areas in Southern California. Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are $20/pound and ribeye rounds are $25/pound.
We can also live in a cave, better for the environment.
But it can and does infect humans and other animals
But yes the current outbreak built up since COVID.
We're taking about Mexico to US trade here so the Mexico specific subprogram seems directly relevant.
> Decades ago, screwworms were endemic throughout Central America and the southern US. However, governments across the regions used intensive, coordinated control efforts to push the flies southward. Screwworms were eliminated from the US around 1966, and were pushed downward through Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. They were eventually declared eliminated from Panama in 2006, with the population held at bay by a biological barrier at the Darién Gap, at the border of Panama and Colombia.
However, in 2022, the barrier was breached, and the flies began advancing northward, primarily through unmonitored livestock movements. The latest surveillance suggests the flies are now about 370 miles south of Texas.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/texas-prepares-for-wa...
https://kbhbradio.com/usda-cuts-budget-staff-for-animal-dise...
Part of it was restored a couple of months later.
Elsewhere in the thread people have posted explainer videos (of how the program works) from 2024 that seem entirely unaware of any such breach.
The doge cuts may affect the future of this program, but have absolutely positively nothing to do with the situation now. Nothing. Not a thing.
It is fine to say doge will make this neglect worse, but the neglect happened for a decade.
And that's important. That's vital to understanding why, and how it happened.
And that is absolutely not a ridiculous concept.
The DOGE cuts directly worsened the current situation. It’s unclear if the initial covid era cuts were performed by Biden or Trump (I can’t find a date or primary source for those).
In a critical time when monitoring and action were desperately needed, we eliminated the agency that'd do that.
If there had been any political will for this things would have been set in motion since 2023, likely even before that when the reports from the scientists working on control started pouring in.
Blaming a few weeks of funding lapse one year into an outbreak in a control project that's been running for decades is absurd.
From a link in this thread: However, since 2023, cases have been increasing in number and spreading north from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
The cost to fight this back will definitely exponentially increase.
So I agree with the commenter that falsified my claim because they are correct, the date of breach was earlier and the time to react was then.
And frankly, it's sad enough for Musk already - richest guy in the world, he could have actually done something politically on his own, and yet he still ends up being used as a useful idiot scapegoat by a con artist. "But Trump promised he cared about the debt!!1!1!"
"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.
Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
What assholes. :(
It doesn’t render the cattle or meat from the cattle useless. Obviously if affected cattle are untreated they will succumb to the pest.
To clarify: it was never eradicated. It’s been actively managed and kept at bay. Now it’s punching through some holes.
There are always periodic outbreaks in Central America and Mexico. The current one started in 2023.
One common vector is illegal cattle trafficking.
Beware of the fear porn spreading around this issue. I have already seen articles posted showing what happens when rubbing ones eyes or picking ones nose after handling raw food and of course it is horrific but screw worms are just one of many real risks. Food handlers in first world countries are taught not to touch their faces and to wear gloves among many other safety practices with raw meats and vegetables. Everyone both vegetarian and carnivore unknowingly eat many types of larvae, bacteria, mold, fungus and insects all the time.
I know I will get beat up for going against the agenda but I am that guy.
Food safety with raw meets isn’t really going against the agenda.
Is it just that we all spend time in our bubble and take that to other groups?
I don't even know what agenda he's going against by saying one should be careful around raw meat. Who's on the other side of this?
They're not really good, but they're safe.
Ecoli alone should be enough to be careful with handling raw meats (of any animal) and of course the worms and other things. Specially if you have ANY wounds, small as they are, if e.g. lemon juice burns, is an open wound.
Also meat should be cooked properly. Lately seems to be kind of hype, almost a competition, who eats the rawer meat. 5 star chefs are pushing more and more red, even I have seen “chefs” simply literally laying meat for 5 seconds. The texture is gummy, taste horrible, and just dangerous.
This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.
Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
Everything I'm reading says it has been funded by USDA, and in fact funding has been significantly increased during 2025.
USDA manages the production of the sterile flies. USAID was a major funding source for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization which did the monitoring.
> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"
I tease. Folks have strong opinions on the topic.
It’s not a huge problem in the US. We eradicated screwworm in the 60s.
We are trying very hard to keep it out. The US normally works very hard to monitor and prevent these situations in trade partners.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flesh-eating-scre...
Was is past tense, indicating a historical problem, not a current one.
But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.
Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.
We have different responses to other pests. For example, Florida maintains a mosquito control program that sprays vast swathes of the state with insecticide from both the ground and the air every 7 days. I imagine that other southern states do as well.
USDA approved an emergency funding of 165 million in 2024 for this issue
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/agency-announcements/usda-ap...
Government budgets are usually public. Do you want a secondary source, like a news article?
Mexican Livestock halted while US is in trade war with Brazil (21 percent of all US beef imports).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olj8arvfYj4
Why add "proven" before science?
Nobody expects the USDA to handle such problems with "unproven science", for whatever it could be.
For decades they've made the sterilized flies by exposing them to gamma radiation that damages their reproductive system and it's been effective.
Am I getting doubtful of every announcement from this administration or are they trying to tackle conspiracy theories from the start?
I'm pretty sure it's a political thing, and is meant to be read as "don't worry, we aren't using any problematic science like mRNA vaccines".
Guess you all like eating expensive beef.
What you say is maybe true but irrelevant. We don't have to grow grass.
Abstractly, using land for crops is around an order of magnitude more efficient when considering only calories per unit area, but when considering the total system i.e the humans consuming it, there's an argument to be had that more livestock could be more efficient when considering all the side effects of a huge population of malnourished humans overeating refined hyper-paletable carbs.
For either side of this argument, the real issue is industrial agriculture producing both crops and livestock in unsustainable and nutritionally devoid ways, that are incredibly bad for the environment and humans consuming it.
I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but we badly need you to fix this. We've already asked you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751806).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Yep. I hear that.
<saturday-soap-box>
The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.
Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.
</saturday-soap-box>
Or it’s only natural when a non-human species is killed off by another species?
You should not reply to any of them, but just flag them, honestly.
At some point mankind added moral.
And I wrote „just nature“ because parent used it’s nature as a justification. Hence the moral part.
Eating, fundamentally, reduces some other organism's population. All of nature does it.
We consume life and the byproducts of life. Even the high energy gas exchange we rely upon is 100% a waste product that we consume.
Life is fundamentally about consuming and repurposing the materials of others.
You don't need to have sex. You need to eat to survive.
Our bodies are naturally adapted to consume wildlife. It is the most natural state for our body plan and biochemistry.
Our body cannot make all of the amino acids and metabolites it needs to be healthy. If technology and food fortification vanished one day, we would be forced to eat meat to survive. Non-meat diets are only enabled by technology. Without it, we would not even be having this discussion.
It‘s not eat : rape, it‘s eat: fuck, so for some the equivalent for rape is eating meat or more specific killing animal : rape.
We evolved to eat and we evolved to fuck.
But like sex doesn’t mean rape so does eating not necessarily mean meat or at least no much and not without consideration who the animal is raised before we kill and eat it.
A long time in many societies we didn’t really care what women felt during sex or if they were even willing to.
But we evolved further and learned women have the same rights as men and rape is a bad thing. We even redefined what is considered rape. It’s not that long ago that raping your wife was impossible from a legal point of view.
We also changed our view on factorial farming, at least many of us. At least we want meat from a happy cow that lived on the pasture and not penned up in the barn without sunshine. The next step isn’t that far, no animal should be killed if nutrition is possible otherwise. We already spare some animals as food. In the west it’s cats and dogs, in India cows. And some include all animals in the don‘t eat category.
The crucial point is the morals of society.
Being has was once a sin, now nit so much at least in the western world even if some try to turn that back.
We also evolved to kill especially with weapons because our natural one aren’t that great. We kill lots of other humans, of course the evil one is always the other side because killing is bad nevertheless we evolved to do quite effectively.
Evolution is a explanation not an justification.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...