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- [00:00]
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Katherine Rampel
I'm Katherine Rampel, economics editor at the Bulwark. Thanks so much for joining me for Bulwark Takes. I am joined by my excellent colleague Jonathan Cohn to talk about the most comedic, most entertaining of topics, flesh eating parasites. Jonathan, let's talk a little bit about the New World Screwworm that has apparently now invaded the United States. This week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a case of New World screwworm that was confirmed in a three week old calf in La Prior, which is near the US Mexico border. What is the screw worm? And should we be freaked out?
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, well, we should be a little freaked out, especially if we care about, you know, the agriculture business. The New World screwworm, it is a fly actually. It's the New World screw worm fly and basically the, yeah, and the fly, the female fly, it, it finds open wounds in mammals. Other, I think it's just mammals. I, you know, but commonly livestock example, finds open wounds. It lays its eggs in the open wounds. The larvae grow, they kind of nod, chew at the wound. That's where the flesh eating comes. They're literally eating flesh. Eventually, after a couple of days, they drop out. The larvae then burrow into the ground. They make new flies and that's how the whole cycle replicates. But meanwhile, during that period, while they are in the wounds and flesh, they are causing problems. You know, they're eating flesh. And in addition to that, you can get secondary infections. And in mammals, you know, it can eventually become deadly, if not from the larvae, then from the secondary infection itself.
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Katherine Rampel
Okay, so not something you and I want to get. Not something we want. Cattle.
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Jonathan Cohn
No, nothing we want to get.
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Katherine Rampel
If we have a herd of cattle.
- [03:00]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it mainly is. It's mainly an issue for. For livestock, for animals, for wild animals. It can infect human, humans. It's not common. Doesn't happen much, but it does happen. We actually had a case a couple of years ago in Maryland. A woman who had come from somewhere in Central or South America, which is endemic to the Americas, brought it up, got infected. She wasn't. We were able to treat it. We can treat it and actually you can treat it with ivermectin. You know, the great medicine that was supposedly. Was great for Covid. Yes. Now. Yes, yes, yes. Well, you know, it's. It's an anti parasite drug. So this is a parasite and this is. This is actually what it works for. So we can treat it in humans again, you know, on these sort of scale of human pandemics that we need to worry about. We got Ebola running around in hantavirus, you know, you know, this is not that event. I mean, this is. I do not worry about, you know, human impact, but very big issue for animals and for livestock. Historically, it's been a big problem for ranchers. And it was, in fact, we eventually going way back in the 1960s, we finally figured out a way, kind of eradicated, and we did get rid of it here in the United States. But again, now we have a case here.
- [04:13]
Katherine Rampel
Yeah. So we haven't had it in livestock in the United States since. I think I had read like 1966. Yeah. First confirmed detection of New World screw. Oh, at least in Texas, since 1966. So why is it back?
- [04:25]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, so it is back. And this is a sort of. This is not entirely clear, but we had basically pushed it all the way down, kept it from coming north of South America, you there, you. Basically, the way you get rid of it, the eradication method, is you breed sterile male flies. You basically take the male version, you irradiate them so they become sterile and then you release them into the wild. They mate with the females. Female screw flies only mate once during their lifetime. So if they mate with the sterile male, they will not create offspring. That's how you eradicate them. Turns out to be a remarkably effective way of getting rid of them. That's how we got rid of them in the 1960s. It is endemic, so it does keep popping up. But we have basically created what they call barriers, in effect, as sort of choke points around islands. And one of them is in the Darien Gap between Panama and South America. For some reason, about two, three, four years ago, we started seeing them come up north of there. Again, the screw room started migrating north. There's a couple of theories. I mean, again, this is one of those where it's not entirely clear what had happened, but it looks like it's a combination of factors. Some of them related to cattle populations, some related to weather change. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different factors going on. We did have a case there was an infestation in Florida not too long ago that was affecting some of the deer population. There was. They'd gotten in there somewhere. They think it got there. I think the theory is through some kind of shipping lane. I do know that during COVID there were because of travel restrictions during COVID that apparently had some kind of ripple effect on the ability to deploy these flies in the sort of preventive ways. So that may be a factor. But basically it's been climbing up for the last two, three years. We have seen it climbing up and so we've known this might be coming. Which, you know, would suggest we'd be extra alert for it. Although that brings us to the subject of, you know, what we've been doing at the Department of Agriculture, etc.
- [06:35]
Katherine Rampel
Well, before we get to that, I just want to stick with like how this thing is getting here because the Trump administration, including USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, have suggested that the real person to blame or entity to blame is the Biden administration and its so called open borders policy. Like here's a tweet from Brooke Rollins where she blames explicitly Biden's immigration policy. She says the threat didn't appear overnight. It was the direct result of the Biden Harris administration's weak foreign policy agenda and failed immigration policies and wide open border. She notes that for decades the New World screw worm was kept thousands of miles from the US through one of the most successful animal health programs in history. Which jives with basically what you've just said and then, you know, blah, blah, blah. Enter Biden Harris. The barrier broke down in 2022. Uncontrolled illegal immigration, commerce and animal movement through the Darien Gap surged and New World Skurm moved north into Central America and eventually reached Southern Mexico by late 2024. So is there truth to that narrative there? It sounds like some of the facts that I just read out sound a lot like what you just repeated. Is there truth? Like, should we be laying some of the blame for this breach of the barrier? I Guess this outbreak in Texas at the feet of the Biden administration.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I mean, I don't think so. Again, with a caveat that this is a developing situation, you know, and people are going to talk about this and there'll be more investigations and we'll spend some more time analyzing why this happens. So you never can be sure, but everything I've seen and read and what I've heard suggests that immigration really doesn't. That doesn't fit. It doesn't fit the timing. This is actually. Apparently we were starting to see the screw worm migrate north before these sort of Biden policies took effect. A much better, more plausible explanation is, like I said, that some of the travel and supply restrictions during COVID made it difficult to deploy some of the mitigation method and protection methods that we had. And of course, you know, it's not carried. I mean, it's very rare for humans to get it. So it's not likely that this sort of migrated across the gap on humans, you know, was that. Will it turn out there was some role that immigration policy could have played? Maybe. I don't know. I think we'll find out. But at least all the sort of experts I am reading and seeing, they don't really think that explanation holds hold water. This is not about. It's not an immigration issue.
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Jonathan Cohn
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Katherine Rampel
Okay, so then on the the flip side of all of this, there is also a lot of finger pointing at the Trump administration and Doge related layoffs at the USDA suggesting that maybe the USDA was asleep at the switch. Is there any truth to that narrative?
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Jonathan Cohn
So here's what we know. We know that first of all USDA got hit pretty hard from Doge cuts in general and we know that it included veterinarians, inspectors, people who in theory could have worked on, you know, this sort of detection. So we know that part is sure. We also know that when they dismantled usaid, the, you know, the global Health Agency, we pulled all this money out, we pull all these contacts out that had ripple effects on multiple international efforts, including pest control, including some of the agency that worked specifically on the detection suppression of screw worm. Now did that lead to the situation we are here now? Again, I don't know. I don't think we have that piece yet. Some of you know, I would be interested to see that reported. It is plausible certainly that have you know, we had been fully manned at USDA that, that you know, we've been fully funding that agency, we might have caught some of this earlier. We might have been able to react earlier. But you know at this point I, I would say that's a possibility worth investigating. Know I, I, I wouldn't just jump and say yes for sure. You know, we, you know if it wasn't for Doge cuts we wouldn't have screw room. We might have it anyway.
- [11:37]
Katherine Rampel
Yeah, I have that. 1377 workers left the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service through Trump's buyout. So that's related to all of the, the Doge purges and and whatnot last year. But as you point out, we don't necessarily know like but for those exits would we, would we be in the same situation?
- [11:59]
Jonathan Cohn
I will say on influence that when these cuts happened, I will say there were warnings, I mean people were very specifically warning that if we are cutting inspectors, we're cutting usda, we're cutting from this, we are going to see a rise in Hassan, things like that. And I, I would feel comfortable saying that if may or may not turn out that screw worm is is is you know, is here as the sort of invasion of screw, screw worm now is tied to these cuts. It may or may not turn out to be the I would wager pretty good bet though that if we look at the Next couple of years, we will see more examples of pests and crossing borders and missing inspections because of these cuts. So if it's not screwworm, it might be something else.
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Katherine Rampel
Yeah. There was this interesting story a day or so ago about how whatever the department like the group, I think it was at the FDA that investigates insect infestations was itself infested by an infest, an insect infestation. I think it was bedbugs. Did you see this story? It was amusing.
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Jonathan Cohn
I did not see that story.
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Katherine Rampel
So, I mean, again, like, we don't know what the counterfactual is. Maybe the bedbugs would have arrived no matter what. We. Maybe this real worm would have arrived no matter what. We don't know.
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Jonathan Cohn
Do you know the other piece of this is that the Texas Department of Agriculture was the official there, has been saying the USDA has been slow to react and that this has been a problem, problem. Now, I don't know enough about Texas politics, know what backstory is going on there. This is a Republican official, though, so it was noteworthy that he was accusing usda and, you know, he was very much Trump. You need to get involved. You need to do something about this. So he seemed concerned, which would, you know, either there's some political backstory there, or in fact, we are seeing a sluggish USDA response, which would be entirely consistent with what we have seen across the Trump administration. So many other ways that as they've got to these agencies, you know, the basic blocking and tackling of government, the sort of basic function in these departments, just isn't working. Now, I, you know, obviously, the other reason I would imagine he's concerned. This is a huge economic issue. Right. I mean, for, For Texas.
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Katherine Rampel
Yeah.
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Jonathan Cohn
For the cattle industry. I mean, you tell me. I mean, I don't need. This is your. This is your. You tell me how big a deal is this economically for the markets?
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Katherine Rampel
I mean, huge beef prices, as I'm sure everyone watching already knows, are way, way up. And that's because of a combination of things. You know, again, it's not all about dumb decisions policymakers made. We've had a drought. We've. There was this screw worm outbreak in Mexico and that limited the number of imports, understandably, that we would be getting for beef. And, you know, there's like, concentration in the meat processing industry, although that predates some of this. So it's a little bit hard to blame that entire. Even though I know that there are a lot of, like, populists who want to point to that doesn't help, but it doesn't really explain the recent run up in prices. But basically the bottom line is that herds are at their lowest level in like 75 years. And so if you have a lot less supply of beef and you have more or less the same amount of demand or even growing demand, that's going to push prices up higher. And now that you have this outbreak, that's going to potentially supercharge that price growth. Although I should point out that in the immediate term it may have the opposite effect. Because one thing that often happens is when there's like an outbreak like this or even a drought that suggests that bad things are coming in the sort of the medium term and that the herd is at risk. You may see a lot of cattle farmers actually kill their, their herds now to take advantage, you know, to basically be able to sell the meat while they still can before the screw worm gets to them or the drought makes it a lot harder for them to feed their livestock, et cetera. And so in the near term, you may end up seeing beef prices go down because there are a lot more steer that are sent to the slaughterhouses to, to get turned into beef for supermarkets and restaurants and the like. So, you know, it can kind of cut both ways, but over the longer term or medium term, that will drive up food prices, right? So like, if, if a bunch of cattle herders, you know, people who are, who are growing beef, essentially, if they kill off their herds today and sell them on the market, that might immediately depress prices. But it's. It takes a really, really long time to, to replenish those herds, to rebuild those herds. Like, this is kind of the same thing that we saw with chickens when we had bird flu, right? You had a lot of farmers kill off their flocks, and it takes a long time to rebuild those flocks. It takes much longer, in fact, for cattle herders, you know, those kind farmers of beef to, to replenish their herds because, like, mommy cows only have baby cows. I don't know, like a couple times a year. I, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong, but it's not that often. And so it takes a while. If you've, if you've killed out, killed off the moms and you don't have new calves being born, then it takes a little while to like, get back to where you were, which is part of the reason why all of these factors that we've seen to date, you know, again, the, the drought and the screw worm and various other things have ground down herds. So Low, and then of course, you know, where we're at the 75 year low. And it's going to be much worse in the near future or, excuse me, in the, in the medium term, potentially depending on what happens with killing off herds, you know, in the next couple of months. So, yeah, it's going to drive prices up. And like I said, it's a combination of policy decisions as well as natural phenomena. And sometimes those things can feed on each other. And in the meantime, you know, I'm not sure that consumers are going to really differentiate. They've already seen beef prices go up quite a bit at the grocery store to their highest levels on record, and they'll probably be pretty mad. So it's not going to be super useful to be like, well, the screw worm, you know, whatever. It's not our fault, it's Biden's fault. So, you know, I'll be interested to see like both the economic effect and the political effect, all of this, particularly since like, Brooke Rollins again, the USDA secretary, had said back in, what was it, November that they had gotten things under control. Can we actually play that?
- [18:47]
Brooke Rollins
Going to be reopening the borders. We've got screw room under control south of the border still. A couple more things before we get there, but we're getting close and, and the president is hyper, hyper focused on this. So our numbers and our formulas are showing that prices will start coming down as soon as next spring and certainly by summer and fall of next year.
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Katherine Rampel
Yeah. So that that forecast is just not going to happen. These supply chains have already been screwed up. They're going to be screwed up even more. And, you know, and one other thing that I wonder about, John, is you mentioned USAID and the cuts there. What, how different is our situation? How much harder is our situation? Because we're not coordinating as much with our neighbors, with other countries.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, this is a prime example of how you want partners in the world. I mean, you know, this is not, you can't close the board. Just shutting down the border isn't going to work here. I mean, if the infestation comes up to the border, it's going to get across one way or another. This is a kind of, you know, we want to be partnering with Mexico, you want to be partnering with the countries of Central America and South America. And we are now, you know, we have an administration that, you know, disdains cooperation. And so there will be, you know, with this particular episode, you know, will there be partnerships? I'm sure I'm sure there's lots of communication happening, happening right now, you know, between the Department of Agriculture here and in Mexico and places like Guatemala and all the way down to Panama, Colombia. But I think there is no question that, you know, this is an example like hantavirus, like ebol, like every other global health that you want to be part of a world network that is monitoring these, working together, sharing information, coordinating actions. And we have just, you know, we spent, you know, that one of the biggest great successes of post war, post World War II America was our ability to, to integrate ourselves into those networks and to be a leader in that. And we are in the middle of Washington administration that is just dismantling that. So there's just no way we can. I mean, you think about these sort of the bad will we've generated with actions we've taken, the number of people we've lost. You know, you think about senior diplomats who have left or been pushed out. You know, those are the people who know. I mean the reality is, you know how this works in government. You're trying to coordinate actions with, you know, you're trying to coordinate with Colombia and you're trying to coordinate with Guatemala. And it's not, you know, what you need is the person who knows who has the cell phone of the diplomat, you know, diplomats in those countries who can get through those countries bureaucracies or knows who to talk to, knows how to find the context or you need the plugins to the local organizations on the ground that are going, man, you know, that are sort of on the ground working on mitigation or working on prevention. And that is what we've lost. When we took away usaid, we just burned or we, I'm sorry, let's use Elon Musk's phrase. We fed that into the wood chipper, which Elon Musk thinks is great. Well, this is what you get.
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Katherine Rampel
And whether or not eating wood chipper.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, there you go. Flesh eating woodchuck. Yes. But I mean, that's really what we're looking at. I mean, and you know, you look at any one of these episodes we're dealing with right now. So screw worm and Ebola and Hantavirus and you know, what role has the cuts to USAID played? Any one of these. It's hard to be specific right now. We'll find out as the reporting goes. Well, there's no question in my mind that our ability to react to these sorts of threats, our ability to prevent them, to detect them, to re. To, to contain them, was there is greatly diminished right now and we're paying the price.
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Katherine Rampel
Yeah. And and to your point, it's not just that we have lost our personnel, who have that Rolodex or list of phone numbers in their cell phones for who to call and how to coordinate. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization Global Health Security program with which has responsibility for trans boundary animal disease management reduced its screw worm surveillance as US funding was withdrawn last year in March of 2025. So we lack the personnel. Other countries or other NGOs may lack the personnel because we have basically defunded them and maybe we thought that was America first back in the day by defunding this, you know, UN food program, UN food and agriculture program. But in fact that may not have been in our self interest. Forget about the altruistic, you know, world benefiting interests here. This may not have been in our self interest because we have lost that surveillance network essentially that worked on our behalf as well. Because again, like as you point out, you can shut down the border to humans. I don't think the flies, the screw worm flies are necessarily going to obey that, that edict. And I'm not really sure border patrol has the ability to like detain and interrogate all of those flies that may be disobeying our border policies. So might have been helpful to have someone on the other side of the border monitoring this stuff. All right, well thanks so much, John for those terrifying insights into a flesh eating fly that may soon be coming for us or our cattle, but hopefully neither. On that comforting note, thanks so much for tuning in. Tune in to more bull work takes. When you get a chance you can find us@thebull work.com.
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Jonathan Cohn
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Katherine Rampel
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