Hey everybody! Let’s talk about a disgusting parasite!
You might have heard in the news that the New World screwworm fly (Cochliomyia hominivorax) has been found in Texas.
Unlike most maggots that we’re familiar with, screwworm maggots eat healthy flesh; the adult flies lay their eggs near wounds or places with soft body tissue and the maggots burrow in to feed. This increases the risk of infection and makes the animal vulnerable to additional fly strikes, creating a terrible cycle.
Between June 3 and the moment I’m writing this, 11 cases of New World screwworm have been found in Texas and one has been found in New Mexico, mostly affecting cattle, but also affecting goats, sheep, and a dog.
The New World screwworm tends to wreak the most havoc on cattle, and Texas has the largest cattle industry of any state, so you can easily see why this fly’s reemergence represents an urgent and expensive challenge for Texas cattle farmers.
What’s frustrating is that the New World screwworm had been extirpated from the United States until recently. It was the very first species on which the sterile insect technique was tested in the wild. Millions of sterile male flies were bred in captivity and then released to compete with fertile males, thereby slowing and ultimately reversing population growth. Because of releases of sterile flies beginning in the ‘50s, the New World screwworm had been eliminated from the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Caribbean.
So why has it come roaring back?
To explain that, I guess I should finally get around to talking about that disgusting parasite I mentioned: Elon Musk.
According to Agri-Pulse, which covers agricultural news in the U.S., the return of the New World screwworm can most likely be blamed on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to Agri-Pulse and other agencies, DOGE’s cuts to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID, which was cut so severely that it effectively no longer exists) had the side effect of ending monitoring programs for the New World screwworm, which could have potentially stopped the outbreak before it started.
If you think that’s bad, that’s just the very tip of the iceberg. Musk’s dismantling of USAID has already had far, far worse consequences.
In an interview just last month, former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich said that his agency had been a poster child for efficiency. USAID was the branch of the federal government that delivered foreign aid around the world on just one percent of the U.S. federal budget, saving an estimated 92 million lives worldwide in the last 20 years.
Enrich said that the organization’s work wasn’t just charity; it helped promote national security by monitoring infectious diseases abroad and preventing them from entering the U.S.
Some of USAID’s most important work was combating diseases like AIDS in multiple African countries. USAID clinics would offer food, medical supplies, and emergency services to the locals. When Musk killed the organization, he killed the people who relied on it.
Famine, rising AIDS cases, and medical emergencies have claimed the lives of about 750,000 people in Africa since Musk destroyed USAID a year ago. And by the way, that’s the conservative figure; some think it’s closer to a million, and that number will only continue to grow over time.
You can argue that Musk isn’t culpable, that he didn’t pull the trigger, that whatever consequences happened in Africa are an unintended side effect, but the fact remains: if Elon Musk hadn’t waltzed into the White House with his dumb chainsaw and created a government agency based on a meme, three quarters of a million people would still be alive.
And what’s Musk’s punishment for dismantling our government and dooming hundreds of thousands to a horrible death? Becoming a trillionaire, of course.
Yes, Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s put that into perspective.
Imagine you make $100,000 a year. That’s a nice wage! Now let’s compare that to a million dollars, a billion dollars, and a trillion dollars.
100,000 seconds is equal to about 1.16 days. That’s a full day plus about four hours, enough time watch the extended editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies twice in a row, plus a few hours for breaks.
One million seconds is equal to 11.5 days. That’s enough time to take a leisurely cross-country drive across the U.S. while stopping to see some sights.
One billion seconds is equal to 31.5 years. That’s long enough to watch the entire lifetime of The Who drummer Keith Moon.
One trillion seconds is equal to 31,500 years. That’s enough time to watch everything that happened between Homo sapiens coexisting with Neanderthals as they hunted now-extinct megafauna during the Ice Age and, I don’t know, The Kardashians.
There is a reason that the growing American resentment toward billionaires, and now trillionaires, does not generally include the millionaire class. A million seconds is equal to a nice vacation; a trillion seconds is equal to all human history that unfolded between the era of European cave art and the present.
But for all his wealth, at least there’s one thing that Elon Musk will never have:
Enough to fill the howling void inside him.
