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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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Science Memes
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Basically. We had previously driven the screw worm south of the darian gap and we had been keeping it there by continuously dropping sterile flys across the region to prevent them from breeding. But the mitigation measures were cut to save money so now we're back to having screw worm in the US.
This comment needs to be at the top. This was an intentional choice made in the first trump administration to just…stop doing the cheap thing that had been working for a generation. Now the exact expected outcome has come to fruition.
And to generalize it more, pests and diseases are rarely truly eradicated, that's part of why smallpox is so notable, the virus only exists in laboratory settings anymore (and that's partly because it's a predominantly human disease). Usually eradication means in an area or in people in an area. Because of that it's usually an active effort to keep it out. Measles was eliminated in the developed world, but it was still around, it was just kept at bay by mass vaccination. As vaccination rates fell it was able to come back through interactions with places it hadn't been eliminated.