r/news • u/happyharrr • 7h ago
Two more Texas screwworm infections found in animals far apart, USDA says
https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/texas-screwworm-infections-found-animals-apart-usda-133683027654
u/zephito 7h ago
Well it sure is a good thing Palantir got a huge contract to "safeguard the food supply".
/s
236
u/Ready-Ad6113 5h ago
What are they gonna do? Steal the insects data?
19
u/Dopeydcare1 2h ago
They want to harvest the screwworms to make it so they inject data recorders into their human hosts
→ More replies (4)78
u/dlegatt 4h ago
If they "safeguard the food supply" in the same way that the trump admin was "safeguarding the ventilator and PPE supply" in 2020, we're going to see famine in America very soon.
→ More replies (4)
1.6k
u/Philostronomer 7h ago
Canada just announced a complete ban on Texas beef/cattle because of this.
763
u/Briebird44 6h ago
Not just that. ANY animals. That includes horses, which sucks for those who compete professionally in rodeos, which are huge in Texas AND Canada especially in the summer. Riders frequently travel to compete in both countries. You also can’t buy a puppy from Texas and have it sent to Canada. (Yes, this is an actual thing that happens)
→ More replies (21)304
u/Deep-Friendship3181 4h ago
Oh no, rich Albertans will be sad too?
Noooo
87
u/cjdavda 4h ago
I have to wonder, with the Calgary Stampede soon, if this throws a wrench in a lot of plans. As a non-redneck Texan, I am mildly amused.
→ More replies (3)46
u/yer_fucked_now_bud 4h ago
It could very likely result in smaller events and more Canadian winners this year. American competitors typically start making their way up this week or next.
This whole thing could have been avoided if Trump made testing or reporting screwworms a federal crime because that's just how we deal with problems these days I guess?
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (10)18
u/ARM_vs_CORE 3h ago
Oh no MAGA Larpers not knowing how good they have it being forced to contend with the damage done by MAGA policies? Say it isn't so.
→ More replies (14)158
u/smokeweedNgarden 4h ago
I wouldn't put it past California to start declining as well. Swingin' that big financial dick might actually do something (it usually does)
→ More replies (2)114
u/SPECTRE-Agent-No-13 4h ago edited 3h ago
Any sane an rational state government would start doing that. Ban live imports of mammals and their meat across state lines from texas. Quarantine is the only way to stop it. But it won't happen. If you must have beef for some reason stock up now.
→ More replies (5)37
u/smokeweedNgarden 4h ago
Well, California regularly targets social issues through economic means. We're the largest purchaser of most things in the US so when she bans something, businesses comply for access to the market.
If California says your vehicle must pass a certain inspection the car company will change all it's models to specification instead of selling two models.
With this case, Sacramento says "No Texas beef" on health concerns and I bet the farm McDonald's et al finds a new supplier. Or drops from California's market.
Either way is fine.
→ More replies (7)
4.8k
u/ElectronicFerret 7h ago
If only there was some kind of department that could warn us about this early.
1.8k
u/DaveVsShark 7h ago
Not just warn but actually address it before it becomes a bigger deal. I guess we're just not allowed to have nice things like untainted food and clean water and air. 🤷♂️
633
u/JustGottaKeepTrying 7h ago
Are you kidding? The money the billionaires save will start trickling down any moment.
101
u/Chewbuddy13 7h ago
It's like a rain of gold down on our heads! We could call it "Gold Rain" or Golden Spinkle". I'll try and think of a perfect name. I'm sure one will come to me.
→ More replies (1)42
u/StrangeContest4 6h ago
I can almost taste the golden sprinkle now!!
43
u/Dicky_Penisburg 6h ago
You joke, but they wouldn't even let us have that without a monthly subscription.
→ More replies (5)89
u/DaveVsShark 7h ago
Any day now!
→ More replies (1)34
→ More replies (10)29
u/Mobile-Bar7732 6h ago
Did you guys get the tariff refund checks that apparently us Canadians pay for yet?
You should build a ballroom once the check clears. /s
17
u/TheNainRouge 6h ago
We didn’t want the asshole tearing out the wing to begin with. He just does things and all the guard rails were apparently holographic. I hate how stupid we have all become.
→ More replies (1)11
u/Lucius-Halthier 7h ago
Well that doesn’t sound like you’re thinking about shareholder value
→ More replies (1)78
u/SwissChzMcGeez 7h ago
You can have anything the American people are willing to vote for.
They voted for bigotry and corruption. Again.
101
u/ChadEmpoleon 7h ago
You gotta understand, they made The Little Mermaid black. We had to vote him in to white these wrongs.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)14
→ More replies (10)11
u/Spiritual-Pear-1349 6h ago
Too bad all our money has to go to bombing schools in Iran instead of monitoring invasive bugs that can destroy society
304
u/AspectVegetable7674 7h ago
At least DOGE cut a couple million dollars from the budget, eliminating the program that kept screw worms out of the us. Surely the economic damage of a cattle and human parasite will be less than that :/s
149
u/allanon1105 7h ago
You mean it wasn’t BiLlIoNs in wasteful spending that DOGE saved us? You mean the whole thing was a cover for them to steal all the data they needed then leave a big mess?
71
u/showhorrorshow 6h ago
Dont forget to crush the several ongoing investigations into his businesses. He just paid a few hundred million to get the pleasure of doing it himself while also stealing all our data.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)24
u/ciel_lanila 6h ago
I thought it was actually a net negative (in cost reduction) once you took into account DOGE salaries, the lawsuits, having to restart programs from scratch that proved too valuable to lose but nothing remained….
19
u/pchlster 7h ago
As we know, a pound of cure is better than an ounce of prevention.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (9)8
79
138
u/Ut_Prosim 6h ago
Its worse than you think.
Got a friend at USDA that said the Mexican authorities did most of the work preventing screwworm from moving North. We had a great relationship for 50 years, but then the Trump appointees came in and started bossing the Mexicans around and being arrogant assholes. Eventually we told them we don't need their help, and it turns out, we did.
78
u/fillinthe___ 6h ago
Wow who would have thought an administration led by brash assholes who have no idea how anything works would hire a bunch of brash assholes who have no idea how anything works…
→ More replies (4)11
u/Kalysta 4h ago
Yeah after APHIS sent me an email verbally fellating Trump when the subject was efforts to control Bird Flu, I knew we were screwed (pun intended) when it came to this worm
→ More replies (1)31
u/mishma2005 6h ago
Or a program that has eradicated it since 1966 that the brainiacs at DOGE cut funding for?
→ More replies (1)49
u/ScarletCarsonRose 7h ago
It'S bIDenS FAulT
→ More replies (1)42
u/Hesitation-Marx 6h ago
You jest, but the USDA secretary is trying to claim just that.
→ More replies (3)20
u/Lifesagame81 6h ago
I'm sure the next admin will spend 100x the save to push back this parasite to where we were holding it before. Fiscally conservative Republicans will demand we slash health, public services, and education dollar for dollar to cover the cost.
→ More replies (3)8
u/IDreamOfLoveLost 4h ago
Fiscally conservative
This propaganda needs to die. Conflating "fiscally responsible" with "conservative" has been one of the biggest crocks of shit in the last century.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (27)11
u/Fattswindstorm 7h ago
We all know that’s a waste of taxpayer money. So instead we as a nation will spend that money on a wrestling event on the white house lawn?
2.4k
u/Flash_ina_pan 7h ago
This is why the government is full of experts and career professionals, or at least was before the worst president in US history unleashed kaptain ketamine and his merry band of broccoli headed fuckwits.
504
u/Prestigious_Tax_4970 7h ago
I wonder how much more money we have to spend after doge compared to what we "saved"
227
u/weasel5134 7h ago
15x Easy
160
u/4193-4194 7h ago
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So let's say 16x.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)107
u/ThVos 7h ago
IIRC, that's almost exactly the projection for USAID expenditures. Every dollar spent was about sixteen saved.
50
u/billytheskidd 6h ago
Yeah but doge cut regulatory bodies that investigated billionaires. And now that those are gone, tech companies can take their place. Only, they won’t feed people or build infrastructure, they’ll build data centers and overthrow governments until everyone is controlled by theil and Ellison and musk and zucks surveillance states.
It is quickly revealing itself to be a hostile take over of every part of the world they can get their hands on.
26
u/Hesitation-Marx 6h ago
Does that also include the value of the incredible soft power TrumpCo squandered?
49
u/smokeweedNgarden 6h ago
Nothing. Thousands of lives have been lost and terrorist bands have formed from just cutting USAID.
So nothing we can spend equals what was lost. We can, however, jail those broccoli heads and the next admin can black bag elon like we did Maduro
23
u/Prestigious_Tax_4970 6h ago edited 5h ago
Thats true. The money doesnt mean shit compared to the lives lost. Environmental impacts. Spread of disease.
19
u/pounder309 5h ago
Even at the most charitable estimations DOGE loses the US money because of the cuts to the IRS. We are talking hundreds of Billions lost tax revenue right there, mostly from the wealthy dodging audits.
Beyond that it will be hard to know until the full effects are known. However the Screwworm example is a perfect microcosm of what is likely to happen. The government doesn't spend money for no reason. They spent money on things like fighting Screwworm because the future costs if it gets out of control are far greater than the relatively small cost of stopping the spread.
6
u/kungpowchick_9 5h ago
If I was laid off by DOGE and was called in as a consultant to deal with this worm situation, I would charge 10x my previous salary to even consider it.
→ More replies (11)8
94
u/Mrchristopherrr 7h ago
This is also usually the answer to those dumb Facebook comments saying “why is the goverment spending 2 million dollars on gay flies??”
51
u/pchlster 6h ago
Wasn't that one actually infertile flies so that the invasive population wouldn't spread as fast because they were wasting time and resources trying to breed with flies that couldn't reproduce?
55
u/Fenrils 6h ago
Yes, and also this infection specifically was actually used for one of those Republican one liners about "wasteful" policy. They referred to screwworm infection oversight as "the government is spending millions breeding worms". While I hope that this infection gets contained, I'm fearful that removing that few million a year in spending is gonna result in hundreds of millions of losses.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (3)14
u/Petite-Dinosaur 4h ago
Worse even - these flies only mate once. It's not just slowing them down, they mate with the infertile males and their line dies without ever reproducing.
7
u/Coastalfoxes 2h ago
And it's beyond just screwworm! I found this summary on a news story:
One effective and affordable way to fight back is by releasing hundreds of millions of sterile screwworm flies, as the female flies only mate once in their lifetime, and any eggs they lay will be unfertilised and will not hatch. This method, known as the Sterile Insect Technique, has been in use for many years to control a variety of insect populations, including fruit flies and mosquitos. It works by hatching flies in an enclosed space, and then exposing them to radiation to make them sterile before releasing them into the wild.
20
u/quats555 7h ago
Don’t disparage poor broccoli! A head of broc has much more going on than the head of most of those guys. And healthier, too.
13
u/mishma2005 6h ago
And it’s in our new and improved food pyramid! A piece of chicken, a tortilla, one other thing!
41
u/TheWizard 7h ago
We went thru this exercise during his first term as well, and that one was about dismantling pandemic preparedness/response put together by Obama administration following Bird Flu.
13
u/StrangeContest4 6h ago
It's almost like that red hot stove was, and still is, really hot to the touch🤔
13
12
u/FlexLikeKavana 6h ago
his merry band of broccoli headed fuckwits.
Those broccoli haircut fuckwits in Gen Z had a lot to do with Trump being elected, so that tracks.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (16)12
u/gobblox38 7h ago
Don't forget that the second worse president in US history had a huge negative impact on the civil service. Fun fact, it's that same person in both cases.
892
u/Modz_B_Trippin 7h ago
What a colossal fuck up this is.
125
u/skrilledcheese 6h ago
Just wait, this isn't the only fuck up. The one lab in the country tracking the spread of phytopthera infestans (aka the plant pathogen responsible for the irish potato famine) got DOGEd last year. It no longer exists.
There are dozens of other short sighted colossal fuck ups that have embedded massive vulnerabilities into our supply chain.
I guess not starving to death is woke.
35
u/Soffatjockis 4h ago
Also, the anti-vaccine brainworm RFK moron has made the cases of measles and polio shoot through the fucking roof, which will cause some serious wide spread issues all over the US. And not just the US since the un-vaccinated crazies will travel to other countries as well.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)14
u/EkbatDeSabat 4h ago
We don't have screw worm obviously we don't need the agency. We don't have phytopthera infestans obviously we don't need the agency. We don't have measles we obviously don't need the vaccine. These fucks don't have brains we obviously don't need them.
289
u/GeoisGeo 6h ago
But...but, we had to elect objectively the worst people to government because the internet told us too and for child like reasons (bigotry) we will never admit to!
→ More replies (3)63
u/Loose-Cycle3650 6h ago
But... they were eating the cats and eating the dogs!
/s
→ More replies (2)21
28
u/ChaseMcDuder 6h ago
Conservatives will ignore the repercussions of their cult leader and continue slobbing his knob.
→ More replies (1)24
u/Prudent_Rice7840 3h ago
FUN FACTS:
- If the Screwworm infestation spreads and plays out similarly to the Avian Flu outbreak beef prices will increase 150-250%, and will stay high for several years.
- The US Beef cattle herd is ALREADY at a 75 year low
- Feed and Fertilizer prices already jumped 10% last year due to tariffs
- Feed and Fertilizer prices have risen another 20%+ since the Strait of Hormuz has been closed
- Diesel prices (critical for transporting beef) have risen 30% since the Strait of Hormuz has been closed
- Beef prices have already risen 70%+ since 2020
The Avian flu outbreak caused egg prices to increase 135%, the saving grace of the Avian Flu outbreak was that egg laying hens only take 6 months to replenish.
It takes 2 years to replenish cattle stocks.
Here is how the current leadership of the United States prepared or this scenario:
- March 2025, funding was cut for animal disease control and prevention, including Avian Flu and Screwworm, that supported more than 180 outbreak investigations and responses in 22.
- DOGE slashed tens of thousands of USDA jobs. Including, researchers, veterinarians, lab staff, inspectors, and containment experts at USDA's animal health arm while the country was in the middle of battling bird flu and facing the known approach of screwworms.
- The only NWS sterilization facility in North America was only funded for 1/5 it's needed budget to prevent screwworms from spreading to the US
- DOGE gutted programs that were dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm in Central America. More than 100 US-funded FAO programs were terminated, worth roughly $382 million
- April 2026 (a year after knowing screwworm was advancing) STARTED building a new sterilization facility, which will be ready NEXT FALL. It costs $750million, or $368million MORE than DOGE "saved" by cutting the programs.
→ More replies (7)15
86
u/fultonsoccer7 6h ago
Screwworm can infect ANY mammal, so this has implications for any farm / production mammal, equine, etc.
The "control" for this is to release sterile males since the females only breed once, which is a LOT easier with a singular location. Every day this goes on the web gets further and further spread.
Add it to the long list of things that were previously a non issue until this administration decided to full tilt us into a ditch at record speed
→ More replies (20)
605
u/Bakedfresh420 7h ago
Under Republicans we won’t even be able to eat double cheeseburgers. Donnie Two Dolls is about to tell us we only need a single cheeseburger
255
u/p1-o2 7h ago
Hold on until Fox explains why this is the Democrats fault.
253
u/di11deux 7h ago
They already are. The spin is that because of “Biden’s open border policy” people coming from Panama into Mexico and then subsequently the US basically allowed for screw worm to follow.
The reality, of course, is significantly more complicated.
COVID really hurt - lapses in monitoring allowed screw worm to make its way into Mexico back in 2022. And because Mexico isn’t quite as proficient at monitoring for screw worm, most ranchers knew it was only a matter of time until it showed up in the US.
The reality is, you need a constant pressure campaign of releasing irradiated and sterilized male flies to prevent the larvae from embedding in a host. That requires money, expertise, and extensive collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico - things our current government has decided are liberal and useless.
→ More replies (2)55
u/StrangeContest4 6h ago
... and woke.
17
u/Beard_o_Bees 5h ago
Yup... real men just close their eyes and eat whatever's put in front of them.
10
101
u/Majestic-Assholes 6h ago
I shit you the fuck not I just looked at a fox news article covering this and people in the comments are blaming this on pronouns and open borders.
→ More replies (5)22
35
u/Xboarder844 7h ago
“Democrats should have impeached RFK a year ago. Why did they not block his nomination?”
20
u/mishma2005 6h ago
They’re already blaming Biden and immigrants, you’d think they’d miss this opportunity?
8
→ More replies (12)11
341
u/Mister_Silk 7h ago
Considering the female flies can travel up to 120 miles to lay their thousands of eggs it's no surprise two more cases have been found "far apart".
They really should not have dismantled the program that's been successfully keeping these things out for decades.
We're soon going to experience the joys of hepatitis A outbreaks in elementary schools too since they took the vaccine off the schedule. Just like when I was a kid! That was so much fun.
64
u/genreprank 4h ago
These are the kind of people who could take seat belts out of cars because nobody gets thrown from the car in an accident anymore
→ More replies (1)8
u/Helenium_autumnale 2h ago
plus it limits my freedom to drive like an irresponsible idiot, and we can't have that.
23
u/imbasicallycoffee 3h ago
Wait until you see what ends up happing in the finger lakes to our most precious fresh water supply once they remove the people that have dedicated their lives to protecting the massively important habitat.
→ More replies (7)7
310
u/LividWheel9779 7h ago
I'm so happy DOGE cut their "needless funding"!
→ More replies (2)57
u/ImStillExcited 6h ago
Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it needless. Fuck DOGE fuck Musk fuck trump.
→ More replies (3)
477
u/blogoman 7h ago
Republicans are taking our beef away.
208
u/aldernon 7h ago
Republicans really have been going hard, haven’t they?
They’re taking our money at the gas pumps.
They’re taking our money in the stock markets.
Now they’re even taking our beef.
I pity the fools who voted for this and regret their choices- I just hope they learn to be wary of Republicans moving forward, and stop just blindly voting for the hard R on the ballot.
→ More replies (6)94
u/LowerRhubarb 7h ago
stop just blindly voting for the hard R on the ballot.
That won't happen, because their media is captured fully by it. They think literally everything is the Democrat's fault.
59
u/Parhelion2261 7h ago
It's extra funny to hear them talk about that in Florida.
They go "Oh but the Dems" like what Dems? Is been Republican controlled for 30 years
41
u/masta030 6h ago
Like Greg Abbott running on "we need to fix Texas" who broke it when you've had it so long?
→ More replies (1)9
u/DrAstralis 3h ago edited 26m ago
conservative are the same everywhere on the fucking planet. Alberta is the same way in Canada. Blame everything on everyone other than the conservative party... even though they've been in control of that province for something like 39 of the last 40 years lol.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (21)18
u/MissRepresent 7h ago
They could infest any animal, maybe even pigs or chicken.
→ More replies (4)16
407
u/Zealous03 7h ago
The sad part is that these ranchers/farmers would still without a doubt vote for Trump again.
They themselves are the problem
161
u/Ecstatic-Rub-3836 7h ago
Well, they won't be ranchers/farmers much longer when they get bought out in a roll-up acquisition.
86
u/Zealous03 7h ago
And they’ll STILL vote for Trump, even if that were to happen.
25
u/Ecstatic-Rub-3836 7h ago
Of course! They love cutting their nose off to spite their face.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (1)18
u/zetaphi938 6h ago
Can’t wait to buy a pound of shitty ground beef from Blackrock Groundbeef for $18.99 a pound.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (8)36
121
u/Serpentongue 7h ago
DOGE defunded the program that prevented this from coming into America prior, right?
→ More replies (1)91
u/Feckless_Moron 6h ago
DOGE cut funding to monitoring programs. But the breach of containment and subsequent spread was already underway. COVID really caused a lot of pain. Lapses in monitoring during COVID led to the initial breach of containment. It wasn't helped by the fact that we shuttered our local breeding facilities before then, either. We had no mechanism to ramp up production of sterilized flies once containment was breached.
The issue is that, under the ostensible goal of DOGE, one would conclude that these programs needed to be better-funded, and we should have fast tracked restarting our breeding and sterilization programs. Instead they syphoned our personal and tax information en masse, stripped away an insane amount of money both unilaterally and illegally, and only made the existing problem worse.
Now we are here. But where's all the money DOGE "saved"? And how much more are we going to have to spend to get back to where we were, if that's even possible at this point?
It's the same concept we see writ large in Iran. Short-sighted actions lead to long-term consequences, which leave us worse off than we were before this administration.
→ More replies (3)11
u/Accidental-Genius 3h ago
It’s funny that this time the answer is actually ivermectin.
→ More replies (1)
205
u/beardybuddha 7h ago
Anytime this type of news comes up, I just keep thinking about that little shitstain smirking during the deposition about DOGE cuts.
→ More replies (4)40
99
u/sithelephant 7h ago
This does not only infect wounds, or eat dead flesh.
It can also get people too!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12591281/
'On August 4, 2025, the CDC confirmed the first U.S. human screwworm case in decades: a Maryland resident who had recently returned from El Salvador. The patient presented with a painful, enlarging wound, and infestation with C. hominivorax was confirmed through larval identification. The individual was treated with surgical debridement and antiparasitic therapy, leading to full recovery '
Obligatory conspiratory theory: This was all to get over the counter injectable ivormectin approved.
43
u/driver_dan_party_van 6h ago
Debridement is the medical removal of dead, damaged, or infected tissue to improve the healing potential of the remaining healthy tissue.
Not only do you get deworming medicine, but they also cut away necrotized flesh. No thank you.
→ More replies (3)15
u/billthecat71 5h ago
The problem is that screwworms eat healthy flesh. Debridement in this instance would have to include the healthy flesh they infested.
15
u/Ricos_Roughnecks 7h ago
So is it something like a botfly larva?
→ More replies (1)25
u/mquillian 6h ago
Pretty much. It basically lays its eggs on a wound or near a body opening/mucous membrane and the larva hatches and burrows in. It's called screwworm because it has these sort of spiraling barbs that sort of dig/screw in as it grows. 0/10 not a good time.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (4)6
u/mayhemandqueso 7h ago
I was just going to say.. something something ivermectin. Only now more expensive… bc insurance.
→ More replies (1)
59
u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs 7h ago
Make Elon pay for the recovery.
He caused these infections.
→ More replies (1)
26
73
u/Redshirt_Welshy_Nooo 7h ago
Every single story on this topic needs to hammer home that the trump regime has been systematically attacking the agencies and expertise that have successfully protected our food systems from these threats for decades.
→ More replies (1)
22
u/stupid_cat_face 7h ago
Ohhhh shit... you thought the price of beef was high now...
→ More replies (1)
19
u/Electrical-Bee-7362 6h ago
You have to thank the amazing work of Elon Musk and DOGE for this!
Conservatives always proving to be the single greatest threat to this species' survival
81
u/huxtiblejones 6h ago
DOGE is to blame for this. They’re directly culpable. They were even warned about this and ignored it.
The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.
The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).
Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.
→ More replies (1)
16
u/Ok_Cucumber_7954 6h ago
Well, the Texas cattle ranchers wanted less government involvement in their business. They should be happy that they got what they wanted.
32
u/Affectionate-Tank-70 7h ago
Aww look, theyre getting exactly what they voted for. Congrats trump voters of TX, you did this.
13
u/Lonely_Noyaaa 5h ago
A dog getting infested is especially scary because it shows the pest isn't just a farm problem. Any warm blooded animal with an open wound is at risk, including pets and even humans. I'm keeping my dog inside until they get this under control.
→ More replies (6)
13
u/TheOkayBambino 7h ago
This is going to turn into the rice on a chess board example. This weekend I probably ate my last ribeye that will be under $20 for a good while.
→ More replies (1)
13
u/strangerbuttrue 4h ago
I hate thinking about how painful this is for the animal, especially since the fourth case was in a dog. This can hurt humans and their pets in addition to wildlife, not just cattle. So sure, beef prices are at risk, but really the danger is so much larger and scarier!
→ More replies (2)
9
u/Stupid_Sexy_Vaporeon 6h ago
So glad we saved the country $20 by cutting the program that was well in the way to eradicating this. The incoming billions in damages is unrelated.
13
u/ISmokeyTheBear 6h ago
It's like common folk need to go through hard times to remind them why preventative programs existed
31
u/id-driven-fool 7h ago
Ironically, Repubs are going to end up causing so many Americans to give up meat
→ More replies (1)
9
10
u/sevenaya 6h ago
The money we saved by not paying for an ounce of prevention will be the down payment necessary for the pound of cure.
18
u/External-Goal-3948 7h ago
They're going to build a fly factory in Texas and buy sterile male flies from Europe to stop the outbreak.
Isn't it nice to have European allies who can sell us the stuff we need but can't make rn? Huh.
→ More replies (1)
8
u/Hardass_McBadCop 6h ago
A little over a year. That's all the time it took from between when DOGE & the redhats dismantled this program and it began damaging American agriculture.
8
u/trustifarian 5h ago
The fucked the soybean farmers immediately by killing USAID. That was a huge customer for them.
11
u/Bart_Yellowbeard 5h ago
I have zero trust in this administration to do anywhere near enough to stop it. Nor in Texas' current administration.
17
u/Thespiritdetective1 7h ago
Beef already expensive, a good steak about to be a luxury 🤬
→ More replies (2)
10
u/AcanthisittaNo6653 7h ago
The Secretary of Agriculture is soft on screwworms. It's open borders all over again.
8
u/brashthehermit 6h ago
Some MAGA rancher in a few months: "Yea I might have lost my entire herd of cattle, but I'd still vote for Trump again."
7
u/STxFarmer 5h ago
The US beat it down and contained it south of Mexico. But stupid governments (both US & Mexico) decided it wasn't worth keeping south of us so now we spend billions to contain it again instead of millions keeping it south of us. And yes I was here in the 60' & 70's when screw worm was here and saw many boxes of sterile flies dropped here in South Texas.
6
u/RichardCranium943 5h ago
If only a certain someone wouldn’t have stopped the program that kept them under control in the first place.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/iloveurarse 5h ago
The trump screwworm/Ebola pandemics have officially kicked off. Looking forward to the grift and corruption this administration has planned for this pandemic.
7
u/ArnoldTheSchwartz 4h ago
The absolute failure that is the Trump regime. There should be a class action against the Trump Crime Family- the American People vs Trump for what they've done to America to make a buck. The entire family belongs behind bars and the entirety of their assets need to be seized to pay to repair everything they touched!!
→ More replies (1)
6
u/Prudent_Rice7840 3h ago
FUN FACTS:
- The US Beef cattle herd is ALREADY at a 75 year low
- Feed and Fertilizer prices already jumped 10% last year due to tariffs
- Feed and Fertilizer prices have risen another 20%+ since the Strait of Hormuz has been closed
- Diesel prices (critical for transporting beef) have risen 30% since the Strait of Hormuz has been closed
- Beef prices have already risen 70%+ since 2020
- If the Screwworm infestation spreads and plays out similarly to the Avian Flu outbreak beef prices will increase 150-250%, and will stay high for several years.
The Avian flu outbreak caused egg prices to increase 135%, the saving grace of the Avian Flu outbreak was that egg laying hens only take 6 months to replenish.
It takes 2 years to replenish cattle stocks.
Here is how the current leadership of the United States prepared or this scenario:
- March 2025, funding was cut for animal disease control and prevention, including Avian Flu and Screwworm, that supported more than 180 outbreak investigations and responses in 22.
- DOGE slashed tens of thousands of USDA jobs. Including, researchers, veterinarians, lab staff, inspectors, and containment experts at USDA's animal health arm while the country was in the middle of battling bird flu and facing the known approach of screwworms.
- The only NWS sterilization facility in North America was only funded for 1/5 it's needed budget to prevent screwworms from spreading to the US
- DOGE gutted programs that were dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm in Central America. More than 100 US-funded FAO programs were terminated, worth roughly $382 million
- April 2026 (a year after knowing screwworm was advancing) STARTED building a new sterilization facility, which will be ready NEXT FALL. It costs $750million, or $368million MORE than DOGE "saved" by cutting the programs.
→ More replies (1)
6
9
u/Tight_Ad_7521 5h ago
Oh yeah and by the way, this administration is STILL in the process of cutting thousands of scientists in USDA after already cutting thousands.
6
u/mfrunyan 3h ago
I just want to say to all of my fellow citizens, it was a nice run, I appreciate all of the love and caring you provided for your loved ones and friends. And lets end this is a dignified manner. May the earth recover from this plague and once again foster intelligent life.
4.3k
u/Conflixxion 7h ago
And there go the beef prices... again