Chances of current US gov mounting a coordinated scientific campaign to get on top of this seem vanishingly small to me. They’re busy defunding and dismantling any gov operation that smells like science
I heard there was one keeping this under control. It involved transgenic flies, which sounds close to transgender. DOGE ended it. It was also pitched as "why are we studying the mating habits of flies?"
> I heard there was one keeping this under control. It involved transgenic flies, which sounds close to transgender. DOGE ended it.
No.
First, the problem here predates DOGE by an entire presidential administration or more. If you had read the article, you’d know that the northward migration of flies started at least in 2020.
Second, the thing you’re misremembering has no relation to this program. It was funding for transgenic animals in a completely different area of research.
You are repeating hearsay that sounds like it should be the reason. It confirms your political priors while ironically making you feel smug about your scientific knowledge. I’m not a fan of the current administration, but seeing so many people here bend over backwards to blame this on their political enemies, without even a hint of intellectual curiosity is more depressing than anything the politicians have done. Your political team can be incompetent too — and probably is!
> It confirms your political priors while ironically making you feel smug about your scientific knowledge.
You are making the same error. Other Republicans (if not Trump) indeed criticized government-funded research into the screwworm lifecycle. Denying that the party of the president has been opposed to both science and regulation on principle -- including with this particular crisis -- makes you look naive at best, dishonest at worst.
We already have medicines that treat the problem. We've had it solved for a long time. We didn't need to genetically modify flies to solve it then, and we don't now.
> We already have medicines that treat the problem
We do have treatments of screwworm infestations, but it involves physically removing the larva and usually removing tissue as well as systemic treatments like antiparasitics. It's labor intensive and not cheap.
It also doesn't actually fix the _overall_ problem because screwworms will happily lay eggs in wild mammals too and so you will constantly be treating your livestock.
> We've had it solved for a long time
Yes, we solved it with mass releases of sterile flies over decades.
Yeah we did have it solved for a long time. We had no screwworms at all in the country. That was a great solution that lasted decades. Why would having to do all the work of applying medication, paying for the medication, animals that you catch late dying of infection and paying for those animals, people occasionally getting screwworms, pets dying to screwworms, etc etc etc be better or cheaper?
Also they don't genetically modify flies they still just irradiate the larva.
> We didn't need to genetically modify flies [...]
"Involve transgenics" is broad enough cover the intern doing literature reviews on related subjects. The discovery process on an unfamiliar domain is a jargon/term of art minefield, and the phrases that fly past me turn in to shibboleths.
We didn't need to genetically modify them, we just sterilized them with x rays and the released masses of sterilized flies into the population. We had that tech in the 50s and wiped them out in the 60s. The best treatment we had was eliminating them from the United States and that's no longer reality.
They're building a new breeding facility in the US. They can't pull a Don't Look Up on this one because of the powerful business interests they need to placate.