THE SCREW WORM IS BACK! The bane of cattlemen in the olden days! Killed out over a hundred years ago IT IS BACK! Several years back with all the immigrants flooding the US with various diseases I asked how long it would be before the Screw worm would be back in the US.
I remember reading in one of the books by J. Frank Dobie of his family’s fight to prevent screw worms in cattle in his youth. He described how the smell of the tar based Liniment would soak into his hands and smell for days.
One disagreement FRiend, It wasn’t killed out over 100 years ago. We were still fighting them in the 1960s.
They got it under control by dropping boxes of irradiated sterile males which over fly generations cut their numbers EXPONENTIALLY as that nut FR preacher says ( except in this case exponentially means exp(-kt) ).
Like the war on poverty, the agency running the program realised they would soon be out of a job and released fertile flies.A little moral lesson about trusting your friend the government.
Other than that I agree with you. They were a scourge. The cause of enormous animal suffering, agricultural economic damage, and even a few horrific human infections in Texas. i can still smell the nasty wounds and cleaning the wound and the applying the insecticidal topical medicine as a boy. It wasn’t just cattle, also sheep, goats, deer and other wildlife — anything with a wound (could be a scratch) or even a scratch the screwworm flies could lay their eggs in. Some lady in San Antonio had them eating out her nasal mucosa.