Challenges in Containing the Current Outbreak

The twenty twenty six FIFA World Cup Meal in McDonald's is underway withith one of nine legendary cups in the lineup. Christian Pulisk, David Beickham, Lainam Mal, Ronald Dinio, Tierri Henriry, Sun Hng Min, Alfonso Davies, Santi Jermenez. And between the posts, It's grimous! Get one of nine collectible cups with a FIFA World Cup Meal. P participate McDald' for limited time. whilew suppies last. All R rights reserve twenty six McDonald's FF Wor Cup twenty six This show is brought to you by Ground News. Here at Wetneext, we cover the news day in, day out. And when my producers prep interviews for me, they are full of different sources. because you cannot read just one source these days. 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Go to groundneews d. com slash next to get forty percent off your unlimited vantage subscription Groundneews dot com slash next. Use our link so they know we sent you. groundneews d. com slash next Have you walked into a grocery store and checked out the price of beef Recently Because if you ask me This is very American food has gotten very expensive I'm no expert here Kevin Draper is covers agriculture for the New York Times So I called him up and asked him to break it down in cold hard numbers Tell me just how expensive beef has gotten Since twenty twenty, it's close to doubling. In the last year, it's maybe up fifteen percent. I mean, if you look at a graph, it's just directly up and the right for many years Over the last year or so, why have prices gotten this high I think there's u Two main explanations and then a sort of third possible explanation. It's a lot of explanations. Yes, exactly. There's a supply and demand, which is so the demand story is people want more beef. You can attribute some of this to protein craze and people wanting more protein You can do ozempic and people needing more protein because of GLP one drugs. And then on the supply side, we have the smallest cattle herd in this country in seventy five years Bds are smaller, Kevin says, for a few reasons weather, for instance, Drought conditions mean it is harder to feed cattle if you raise them. And once you've thinned out a herd It takes a long time to grow it back. Over the last few weeks though Any hope that beef prices were about to go down started to fade That's because cows in Texas are facing yet another risk something called The New World Screwworm fly. A lot of folks just call it screwworm Despite the word screw worm and worm in there, it is not a worm. is a it is a fly Um, and it used to be All over the United States, you know eighteen hundreds, first half of the nineteen hundreds until we managed to eradicate it in the nineteen sixties. Why are screwormms such a threat feeds on live tissue.. So the screwworm fly lays its eggs in openings in animals,'s often wounds It definitely sounds gross potentially painful. If you talk to old timers, people that fought this thing in the fifties and sixties, we're talking people in their seventies and eighties now They talk about it like it was Vietnam. They talk about it like it's a horror movie, like they are having flashbacks to confronting this horror. I mean, it is don't go looking for pictures of this on the internet if you have a sensitive stomach, like it is It is gross We civ the act of the United States of America Yeah, you tracked down some video of this emergency meeting of ranchers in Texas back in May And u It starts with this guy getting up who an old timer, who remembers the screwworms from the nineteen fifties. Comments, Mr. Wers, if you want to come up One of the first things he does is he like holds up these forceps. Yeah. and he's like This is how I used to pluck the worms out of the cattle I was just a teen in the mid fifties when I faces M school And when I heard about it again the nightmare in the horerst that it brought back It's just unbelievable Clearly there's a real there's some encoded memories there, a core memory and it's not pretty. Right, But notably it's only among that age cohort. And so at that meeting and other meetings, you've been seeing officials sort of literally asking the public like if you have ideas or if you know, you know, think of what we should be doing differently, talk to us because none of us, the officials in their thirties, forties, fifties dealt with this thing. So we don't actually have firsthand evidence dealing with this. you rancher in your seventies, eighties, you're the one that has firsthand experience Another thing this rancher said He said the worst part of it all was that human beings weren't safe from screwworms, because Screworms aren't just going after the cows. And that was when I was like, ooh, that's not great either. And it's not just back then. Yeah I believe we have ten human deaths in Mexico and Central America in the last couple of years. It's not as deadly to humans because You will notice a wound on you that is infested with something and hopefully go to the hospital or get medical treatment. But yeah, something like a couple thousand humans in the last few years have gotten it and then a couple of them have died. Today on the show All about the screworm invasion what it's doing to the beef industry and The rest of us I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What N stick around The twenty twenty six FIFA World Cup Meal at McDonald's is underway with one of nine legendary cups in the lineup. Christian Pulisk, David Vickham, Lainum Mal, Ronald Digno, Thier Henri, Son Hg Min, Alfonso Davies, Santi Jermenez, and between the posts, it's grrimous! Get one of nine collectible cups with a FIFA World Cup Meal Picipingating McDonal's for lited, suppies last, Allights reserve twenty six McDonalds FF Worp twenty six. Hello, It's Javanna Fletcher from Happy Mum, and I'm sponsored by Motorway, the easy way to sell your car for a great price As a muma, anything that helps take a little bit of mental load off is a win. And Motorway really does that. 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Curious about the future of healthcare Tomorrow's Cure, the chart topping an Ambi Award fininalist podcast from Mayo Clinic brings it to you today I'm Kathy Worser, and in this new season, I sit down with researchers, doctors, and industry experts who are leading the way in medical innovation from cutting edge technology to breakthrough treatments, we'll explore how new solutions are improving and even saving lives In the season four Premiere, I'm joined by dermatologist Dr. Saranna Wiles, along with biomedical engineer Dr. Adam Feinberg to talk about how three D bioprinting is revolutionizing medical research and accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare. It's a compelling look at the tools shaping tomorrow's treatments So go ahead, follow tomorrow's cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app table for folks if we can Could you just explain what screwworms R and what they do to an animal. Like the scientific name for screworm really struck me because it's S homin Vorx, which translates to man eater. Right. That's telling you a lot Yes, yes. And so you have you have the female screwworm fly, The fly lays its larva in the wound or an opening of an animal And then when those larva are born into their own screwworm flies, they start eating and what they are eating is what they have right there, which is the flesh of the animal that it was laid that its mother laid the larva into and it starts eating and consuming live flesh Um, lotots of folks are at pains to say this is not going to impact the safety of the meat supply. Is that Is true Like is it a problem if I accidentally ingest one of these guys? I don't think it's great if you accidentally ingest one of them, but you know, that's not the sort of mechanism by which it harms you know, animals. I think what they're saying is that You know, there's there's a lot of steps from when an animal eventually ends up on your plate. And so at various inspection stages, somebody is going to catch this. And so first of all, the rancher has eyes on their animal and if they see that their animal has this infestation, they are sending it to a vet. They are not selling it and sending it to a ughter house Hopefull Somehow if it does, there are, you know a successive chain of agriculture department inspectors, including inspectors in slaughterhouses and things like that that are going to notice a gaping wound on an animal. And so I think it is quite unlikely that sort of just consuming steak or consuming beef that anything bad is going to happen to you. How many cases are there now in the U. S? Because there aren't that many, right? It raises this question of how quickly this is going to spread There are I believe as of the start of recording today, five confirmed cases in the United States, I think Animals In animals, I think it is quite likely there are more cases, but you know, we did this from COVID. the difference between you know a confirmed case that we know via laboratory testing versus I see something on an animal. I think it may well be screwm, but I don't, you know know definitively. We have five cases. I believe we have three in cattle, one in a goat and one in a dog sort of driving home the point that while, you know, we think of this mainly as a cattle thing, part of the reason for that is that's where like the economic destruction comes from. that when a cattle is infested or it kills a cattle, that is, you know, an animal that would have sold for thousands of dollars to become meat, but any any warm blooded animal, can it can hit Okay, take me back in time because screwworms were eradicated in the US in the nineteen sixties. So it's kind of It' stunning to me that we're here. we're back. How did U. S scientists work to get rid of this threat so many decades ago, and why is it back now Yeah, so there's only one good way to get rid of screworms. And so the way they do this is called the sterile fly technique. In these facilities, they breed hundredundreds of millions of screw flies and then subject them to a small amount of radiation. and that makes the male screw flies sterile. These are called fly factories, which is so interesting. They're incredible. justust little little yeah breeding factories for flies And then they load up the millions of flies into airplanes And they fly the airplanes around areas that they want to get rid of the screw or where there's an outbreak or something like that, and they drop them from the plane. And then the male screwworm flies that are sterile go and mate with wild female screwworm flies. And not much happens. And not much happens. Not much happens, which is what you want.. And then they die, not having produced babies And so over years Hundreds of millions of these flies made a week. know you do the math, we're talking billions of these just dropped and dropped and dropped. and eventually you push them out of the United States. You push them south. So in sort of mid nineteen sixties, they were no longer endemic to the United States. There'd still be some from time to time when animals trucked across the border wind events perhaps brought them across, but get them to Mexico producing sternile flies, keep dropping them from airplanes. You continually push them south, south, south, and then you get into this favorable geography where you the continent really starts to narrow. And so sort of by the mid two thousands, we had essentially eradicated them from all of North and central America. And so the you know, Panama, Panama Canal, the Deren Gap, that sort of really thin area, that is where they were. So they were still and still are in South America. But by roughly two thousand six, they no longer existed in North and Central America. Yeah, this geographic point is important because it's like essentially the idea pushed the flies like down, down, down, down down to this point where it didn't take many sterile flies to maintain the barrier becausere only it's like a small band of land there that they know otherwise it's just ocean, so they can't really survive there But in a way, it seems to me that that allowed folks to get laackax, right? Because they're like, oh, we only have to maintain this small barrier. So some of these fly factories that had created the sterile flies that allowed for the elimination of screwormms in the first place started closing down and now here we are. Um The other thing that stands out to me about that, frankly, is the fact that We've literally had years of the screwworms gradually working their way up to larger and larger landmasses, right? That's like deeply frustrating to me as someone, you know, you watch this play out in slow motion I think right now there's u A lot of people looking for sort of blame who failed or what caused sort of this to come back. And we could talk about that and there's many reasons. And you know, obviously this is political. It is was it Joe Biden's administration? Was it? this is now happening during, you know, the Trump administration I think sort of the biggest explanation or reason is one we see in a lot of places. I think it's not too dissimilar to what we were seeing with measles in this country,, something that we mostly had eradicated from the United States, that when when we start forgetting, when we don't no longer have the memory of what this thing was like we forget about how bad it was or how important it was to get rid of it and then institutions built around it Pull little funding here, pull little funding there. You know, oh, let's concentrate on this thing over there and sort of they they slowly creep back. And so you mentioned, you know, we have fewer fly factories than we used to. At one point, we had some in the United States and there were some in Mexico The aggriculture Dpartment estimates we need something like four hundred to five hundred million sterile flies per week. How many reproducing now? Well, cururrently, we have a single facility in Panama that Panama and the United States sort of jointly operate. So the flighties are far away, first of all and Yes. nowhere near four hundred to five hundred million do, potentially? one hundred million a week is what they are making right now. W. A few years ago, they were making much less than that, something like twenty million do a week And now the best estimates are in a year Everything goes incredibly fast. We're building a new facility in Texas. The aggriculture Department is helping fund a Mexican facility that is supposed to get online in a month, maybe a couple weeks. But even if everyone works as fast as they can, they build as fast as they can, scientists do everything they can, we're looking at a year until we can make manufacture five hundred million screworm flies. from a screworm, that's a lot of time to spread out. That is a lot of time to spread out. and that's why this isn't going away in the United States. The question is not Can we get rid of it this year? No, we cannot. It's How much can we contain the spread? Are we talking single digit cases a day, here or there? quarantine zones work Or are we talking, nope, we will be unable to do that. And you know Mexico, I don't know the exact number since it came back there in twenty twenty four, but tens of thousands of cases, confirmed cases in Mexico. So are we on a trajectory to hundreds of cases or are we on the trajectory to tens of thousands of cases as sort of the Open question back after a quick break Sking eating Learning, discovery a ramp using the power of data to push the limits of what's possible That's how we deliver reliable energy to millions across the world A RAMco intntegrated Energy and Chemicals Company learearn more about us at arramMcoode. com. So Aaminia Mal steps into McDonalds looks left, sees Pulisick, looks right, sees Senez. Gives a nod to Ronald Dino in the corner with a FIFA World Cup meeal. Ronald Dino sees Sun in the booth, Sun finds Beckham going for extra bigig Mac sauws. He's got Daviess at the table just behind him. Davy's going for his collollectible cup.! A steal by Henri! Who pulls his own collectible cup? Collect one of nine leegendary cups with a FFA World Cup meal. P participating McDonald' for un limited time whilew suppies last. Allrightighteserve twenty six McDonald's FF Wor Cup twenty six But I do want to highlight like a twenty twenty five agriculture Department report estimated that a widespread outbreak of screwworm could lead to a loss of seven hundred thirty two million dollars for Texas ranchers and one point eight billion dollars for the state's economy Pretty Massive And we really have had evidence of spread for a while and have actually taken action Uh to reduce the spread. like The action that was taken a little earlier, I think it was last year, was to prevent Mexican cattle from coming north into the United States Just keep the disease out as much as you can But I think there's good evidence that of course that wasn't going to necessarily stop everything. thingsings spread and they spread, you know, the The flies fly So that was never going to be the thing simultaneously keeping the Mexican cattle out of the United States, raiseed the cost of beef So it's in some ways a double own, right? where it's like you're trying to prevent the spread in a way that we know probably won't work or at least will not work completely. pllus it makes things more expensive Am I seeing it Right here Yes, yes, you are. I think it is totally fair to think looking back now, the actions that have been taken from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five were too slow and not enough. And I mean, that's self evident because the scworm fly is here and it's really bad. and you can tell it's bad because Brooke Rolls Ariculture Seretary has done news conferences, I don't know, every day for the last five days on it.s I can't tell you how much this reminds me of the early days of COVID of officials all of a sudden going into emergency mode and communicating what they are doing I think it is possible there was a reason to believe it would move slower I think it's also possible to believe that hey, the Panama facility It make one hundred million sterile flies a week. It's only making fifteen, twenty, twenty five. All we need to do is ramp up that facility. that will get us back to containment. And we don't need to spend a billion dollars on a new facility that is just going to be a white elephant and be wasted. And looking at it now, o, much better to have spent m and you know had the flies ready two years ago and then you know start pushing this back down to Panama. But now we're in the land of hard choices of really hard choices. Live cattle band for Mexico has been bad for the Texas ranching industry because a lot of it is built upon bringing cattle in from Mexico. And so we've had feed yards close there. It has raised the price of beef for you you and me because less supply at a time when we've already talked about a very low supply. We don't have enough beef driven prices up Are we going, you know we've seen some states, I think Georgia, Montana, maybe one or two others, they've pass these emergency measures to enhance inspection of animals that come in from Texas. rightight now, not a big deal. Not many Texas cattle are being moved to Montana a thousand miles away. But if we go from five to fifty to five hundred cases, does Oklahoma do that? Does New Mexico do that? Does Louisiana do that? Does the entire country say We do not want Texas cattle coming into our state. And now the slaughterhouses around Texas that are used to getting Texas animals don't get them. We've further restricted the beef supply, beef prices go up. You're laying at a real beef spiral here. Yeah, whether there I think there's certainly a potential for a beef spiral. I mean, we have ten mile quarantine zones around infected animals You can do that when you have five When you have five hundred animals We're quarantining the entirety of Texas at that point. And so you're in the how hard do you go to stop this? too what extent do you accept the spread? You know, what are the things that are really dangerous? Are you worried about animals dying? Are you worried about spreading? Are you worried about the beef supply chain? Are you worried about human health you know, we haven't even talked about this thing can get into wild animals, you know into deer. The last we had a weird little outbreak a decade ago in the U. S and deer and Florida. and you can't quarantine deer. they around the forest. You can't quarantine wild animals and so you kill them. And so are we going sort of have a mass culling, you know program of some wild animals if we start seeing a lot of infections there. like you're you know, it is here and it is only five, but but we're already in the land of bad choices. I want to focus in a little bit if we can on, um, politics of all this and the prices, because I do think that's where the majority of Americans will feel what's happening here I don't think we can walk away from the fact that onal Trump promised that he was going to address affordability And a recent poll in polito saw seventy three percent of people who voted for Trump say that food prices have increased Gly. Beef is certainly a part of that You know, there have been some rumors that Trump is going to weigh in with executive orders to bring down the costs of food, especially beef out of the midters Is Anne possible given all of the things we've laid out and how it seems like the situation is really volatile right now I think the answer is mostly no Um, We you know, the vast majority of beef that is consumed in this country is from cattle that are raised and killed in this country. somethingomet like eighty percent, maybe a little bit more is domestic, which twenty percent is, you know, not You know, it's a sizeable amount. but the vast majority of what we import is ground beefer it's even more, it's lean trimmings. You know, we do very little importing of other cuts of meat. So like steak Partially, this is not even just a beef question. It is a what kind of meat are we talking about?' really hard to make economic sense to like slaughter an animal in Australia and then ship a ton of steaks on a refrigerated ocean liner across the country or across the continent, excuse me in the world, something like that And Ranchers are sort of a very politically attuned and politically united group How have we seen that in the past? I mean, for one, the, you know, the reporting seems to suggest that the executive order, you know, that Trump was going to do a few weeks ago that would allow more beef imports into the country and do various things, ranchers seemingly within twenty four hours