Read: The ‘golden death’ bacterium found in a rotten apple Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating. The eradication was a resounding success. and then in Mexico and Central America-all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. hominivorax or “man eater”-so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.įor untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C.

Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. In those days, screwworms found their way into cattle through any opening in the skin: the belly buttons of newborn calves, scratches from barbed wire, even a tick bite. If you had asked an old-time Florida rancher though, he might have told you boyhood stories of similarly disfigured and dying cattle. That something, lab tests would later confirm, was the New World screwworm, a parasite supposed to have been eradicated from the United States half a century ago.

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