America built a 76,000-square-foot artificial wound to breed 200 million flies a week — then forgot why
To erase a flesh-eating parasite, the US ran a factory that was, in essence, one giant heated wound, dropping sterile flies from planes for decades. The barrier held until 2022. Now the screwworm is marching north again, and a commenter notes the original cure could never be built today.
The New World screwworm was eradicated from the US via the Sterile Insect Technique — radiation-sterilized males flooding the wild population — then held back for decades by a fly-drop 'barrier' at the Darien Gap. The barrier breached in 2022–2023 and the parasite is spreading north again.
The thread frames it as a solution that became a victim of its own success — and flags that the foundational research, irradiating flies with cobalt-60, would never clear an ethics board now.
The grotesque marvel that beat the screwworm
*The Fall and Rise of Screwworm* tells one of the great eradication stories and its unraveling. A 1935 USDA survey counted 1.2 million screwworm infections and 180,000 dead animals in Texas alone. The weapon that beat it was the Sterile Insect Technique: irradiate male flies into sterility, release them by the hundreds of millions, and let them out-compete wild males until the population collapses. The Mission, Texas factory (1962) ran 76,000 square feet, 24/7, producing over 200 million flies a week — a facility one commenter called, quoting the piece, essentially "a 76,000-square-foot artificial wound." The US mainland was cleared by 1966; a fly-drop barrier at the Darien Gap then held the line for decades at roughly $15M a year.
The barrier breached in 2022. By 2025 Mexico had 30,000+ cases, and the fly is moving north again.
A solution undermined by its own success
The thread latched onto the article's Chesterton's-fence framing — a problem solved so completely that we dismantled the conditions maintaining the solution. The most resonant objection was about whether the founding science is even repeatable:
"It sounds like the original research done 30s-50s would not be possible today. No one is getting an ethics approval for that. And 'let me just get some cobalt-60' is probably also not happening" — a commenter on the institutional impossibility of the original program
Another raised the biological long game the technique may be losing:
"Isn't there a risk that the artificially introduced reproductory pressures would select for screwworms that produce males that are resistant to radiation… increasing the proportion of radiation resistant varieties" — a commenter raising the evolutionary-selection risk
And someone caught the article soft-pedaling a live political thread — its one-line wave-off of DOGE-era cuts to the monitoring programs, in a piece otherwise obsessive about detail. The implication the thread lands on is uncomfortable for any long-running public program: the screwworm barrier worked so well that the memory of why it existed faded, the funding frayed, and the fly is now collecting on decades of forgetting.
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