This amazing bit from the wikipedia article about the fly:<p>"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."<p>Incredible!<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochliomyia</a>
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?<p>It's also striking how much these efforts were made <i>harder</i> by US foreign policy and involvement in the wars of Central America, and are still made hard because of our poor relationship with Cuba.
> <i>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?</i><p>This is wrong, harmful effects of radiation on cells, that it causes mutations and makes things sterile, were known long before WW2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discovery_of_X-ray_mutagenesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discover...</a> They basically just put a lot of fruit flies under X-ray radiation and recorded the effects.
Great article. Wikipedia page is also interesting.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique</a>
I was just reading about these drone dispersed little paper balls filled with parasitic wasp larva used to control corn borer.
<a href="https://altigator.com/organic-agriculture-the-treatment-of-european-corn-borer-by-dropping-trichograms-by-drones/" rel="nofollow">https://altigator.com/organic-agriculture-the-treatment-of-e...</a>
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.
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.
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.