In the US, they want to scatter hundreds of millions of flies from airplanes (4 photos)

It sounds bad, but what these flies have to fight is even worse.





The US plans to build a "fly factory" and drop hundreds of millions of sterile insects from planes to combat dangerous parasites spreading from Central America.



Since the beginning of 2023, “screwflies” have been spreading across Central America. They are fly larvae that settle in the wounds of warm-blooded animals and slowly eat them alive. Outbreaks have been recorded in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador. There hasn’t been anything like this for 20 years. In November, the parasites reached southern Mexico, forcing the United States to close several border crossings for livestock trade.

“Screwflies,” as they are called in the United States, are the larvae of the cochlear fly, a subspecies of blowfly. Unlike other flies, they feed on living flesh, not dead flesh. The female lays up to 300 eggs in the animal's wound, and after a day the larvae hatch and begin to gnaw through the tissue with sharp hook-like "teeth". After a few days, they fall to the ground and pupate, turning into adult flies.

Since 2023, more than 35,000 cases of infection have been registered, 83% of which are cattle. Without treatment, the animal dies within 1-2 weeks.

The United States already faced this problem in the 1960s and 70s. Then the parasites were defeated in an unusual way - they bred sterile males and dropped them from airplanes. Sterile flies mated with wild females, but they did not produce offspring, which led to extinction populations.





Currently, only one factory in Panama produces sterile flies — about 100 million a week. That's not enough to combat the current outbreak.

That's why the U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced plans to build a new $300 million "fly factory" near the Mexican border. It will also build an $8.5 million fly dispersal center at an air force base in Texas and spend $21 million to renovate an old factory in Mexico.

By $300 million is a reasonable price to pay to save a $10 billion industry threatened by parasites, according to livestock industry officials.