Elon's DOGE Cuts Brought Back Our Friend, the Flesh-Eating Worm
- Feb 17
- 5 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SKCu4VNfLtU
This pesky thing is called the New World Screwworm. It’s most often found in South America, and then also in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. This little guy loves the flesh of warm-blooded animals. It mostly affects livestock, but people can also be infected.
This fun little guy that was once completely eradicated in the United States, but now we’ve invited him back to play again. And he will eat you. He wants to eat you. You’d think since tourism to America is down, that doesn’t mean like, you resort to putting together novel vacation packages for flesh-eating screwworms, right? Like, that doesn’t seem reasonable. But that’s basically what we’ve done here. Let’s get into what’s happening and how it’s happening.
The flesh-eating New World Screwworm’s scientific name is Cochliomyia hominivorax. Infection by the worm is called myiasis. And if you know what that means, then you already know that this worm is a fly larva, or in other words, a maggot, and it erupts into the living tissue of animals and eats its way out after the adult flies lay their eggs inside open wounds.
Right now, Mexico is experiencing an outbreak of New World Screwworm and human cases of myiasis. Numbers from the Mexican Ministry of Health are up to 141 cases across six Mexican states.
So far, the CDC is urgently informing us all that there’s no evidence that the worm is inside the United States. Except for the two times that it was, just now. One case involved a horse imported from Argentina that arrived with an active myiasis infection caused by New World Screwworm. Kind of cool, actually, because the reason we caught it is that the USDA inspection facility was doing its job right and the infection was caught during import screening. Officials shipped samples to the National Vetrinary Services Laboratory in Iowa, and the infected horse was quarantined and treated before the worm could chow down on anything or anyone else.
And the sole human case that popped up in the U.S. did so in Maryland. Now this was a traveler who was returning home after visiting the country of El Salvador. So this is why I’m telling you about south and central America right now, because all the policy decisions and geo-political goings-on are coming to a head right now with this wiggly beasty.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the United States pushed hard against the encroaching threat of the New World Screwworm. The U.S. efforts succeeded in eradicating the worm from the entirety of the Americas. At the peak of screwworm infections, they ran all the way north to the Dakotas. We got it out of North America in 1966, and then pushed it out of South America, too. But then, of course, certain people began politicizing key environmental policies and spending, and then we have a situation decades later where a flesh-eating worm is resurging because we mistakenly elected the people who convinced us that it was silly to do things like try to get rid of worms that will eat you to death. So in 2023 the worm crossed back into South America, and at this point is right up on the Texas border with multiple cases now poised to pour over into the longhorn state, and into the longhorns. The CDC is reporting that since 2023, all countries where the screwworm was previously controlled are now reporting brand new outbreaks. Good times.
You may have seen this coming, but DOGE cuts in 2025 are one of the big reasons we’re all about to be eaten alive right now. Elon Musk closed almost 500 USDA offices, which was just half of the 800 or so they wanted to shut down. The fake department of Musk and his gang of meddling meme kids effectively halted 180 outbreak operations in 22 countries and 160 laboratories that all specifically worked to prevent the New World Screwworm from gaining a foothold in the United States again.
In August of 2025, the USDA announced a new $750 million effort to combat the worm, including the opening of new facilities. Elon and his citrus-colored, clown-costumed colostomy bag could probably have just not cut their funding and closed these facilities in the first place, but competency and consequences are not their M.O., so here we are.
The thing that we do to fight these kinds of infections is called the sterile insect technique. This is a process whereby facilities raise millions of sterile male screwworms, that they then release into the environment where outbreaks are occurring. Lab flies then compete for mates with the local population, and if they win, and they mate with female flies, they aren’t going to produce any offspring. Over time, the population of insects in the area falls off and outbreaks are eliminated. But this is an ongoing operation that has to be maintained, and you’d have to be some kind of idiot to think that you could just stop certain public health practices and have everything work out......
If you’re traveling to an area affected by the New World Screwworm, there are some helpful guides you can find to limit your overall risk. You can find one from the CDC below. Some of the steps are pretty basic, like dressing any wounds you may have, not sleeping outside during the daytime, and staying away from livestock in affected areas.
Individually, you’ll probably be fine. Globally, we have our work cut out for us, because of the mad hatters currently kneecapping our public health infrastructure. The adult fly, a type of parasitic blowfly, can lay 300 eggs at a time and 3,000 eggs in their lifetimes. Flies can lay their eggs inside wounds as small as a tick bite.
If you’re a medical practitioner or a vetrinarian, you can support this effort by learning or refreshing yourself on what to look for in patients, and what the prococols are for dealing with screwworm infections. Symptoms include a really awful smell eminating from the wound, and lots of other gross things I’d like to immediately forget, and I’m sorry that you have to keep them in mind.
One of the key things to do in the case of myiasis is to not let anyone except an actual healthcare provider remove the worms from your body. That’s extremely important. It’s also important if you can, to keep and store the worms so that you can show it to a doctor and confirm the infection. Doctors, make sure to put the worms in 70% ethanol inside a container that won’t leak and get in touch with the CDC for specimen submission instructions. You should report infections right away to the health department, either local or state. If you’re a patient, you can also do some effing good by making a report.
Now that we’re all sufficiently grossed out, the last thing I’ll say is that, we still never got a single shred of an attempt at an explanation for what’s going on with trump’s hands. Now, it could be repeated IV insertions from multiple tests and treatments we’re being kept in the dark about, but it also could be a flesh-eating worm he caught after cutting the USDA budget and eating too many big macs. Turns out, the call is coming from inside the Whitehouse.
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