When Fools Screw Around

During my sermon last week, I had an entertaining bit of call-and-response with my congregation.  As I noted the essential Goodness of God's work in creation, a congregant saucily responded that mosquitoes were a notable exception.  I agreed, of course, as I loathe skeeters.  Only rarely do I feel moved to show them mercy, and even then I'm only inclined to spare the harmless, pollinating males. Beyond the pleasure of serving a little church where sermons can include some dialogue, that exchange was a useful reminder that creation is both very good and often more than a little unforgiving.  

If we human beings are wise, we take every necessary step to ensure that we aren't sickened or devoured by life, particularly those forms of life that find us appetizing.   Only fools traipse through the world imagining it doesn't want to eat them.  

Where, for example, do we find the Goodness in something like the New World Screwworm?

Screwworms are only worms in their larval stage, after which they flit about as a brightly colored fly.  The males are harmless pollinators, like their mosquito brothers.  The ladies?  Females of the species Cochliomyia hominivorax, on the other hand, are the farthest thing from harmless.  When they lay their eggs, they seek out a living mammal.  They find a soft spot...a wound, a cut, an orifice.  The navels of newborns, the perineum, or the flesh near the eye?  Those areas are also particularly desirable.  There they lay hundreds of eggs.  Those eggs hatch into screwworms, which then bore their way deep into the meat of any mammal, rotating as they eat, literally screwing themselves inwards.  In the process, they inflict agonizing pain and considerable damage, to the point where a severe infestation can kill a host.

Generally speaking, those unfortunate hosts are wild animals or livestock or pets.  But sometimes?  Well, sometimes the Latin name of the species is all too accurate.  Literally interpreted, Cochliomyia hominivorax means SpiralFly ManEater.  It'll infest infants, it'll infest the elderly, it'll infest anything with warm blood, which we have.

Humans generally don't like getting slowly eaten alive, and in the last century, science and agriculture combined forces to eradicate the New World Screwworm from the United States.  Our approach took advantage of an amusingly ironic screwworm weakness: the female screwworm fly can only screw once, after which it retains the sperm of the male within itself to fertilize its eggs for the remainder of its life.   Knowing this, we bred sterile male screwworm flies by the hundreds of millions.  When they mated with females, the union resulted in no offspring...and the species collapsed.

To keep it suppressed, all we needed to do was to continue monitoring screwworm fly populations, both in the United States and...importantly...across the border to our South.  That, and because flies can fly, we needed to support our Mexican and Central American neighbors in their efforts to keep that parasite from recurring.

There was just such a screwworm resurgence in Central America in 2022 and 2023, which...not being led by complete morons at the time...America dedicated substantial resources to help defeat.

But in March of 2025, America's emergency international support for Central American and Mexican screwworm monitoring and suppression was eliminated.  That wasn't our problem, or so the DOGE Bros and their algorithms insisted.  Why send our Borrowed Dollars to foreigners?   Cut cut cut!  

Among all of those blindly applied cuts, this one stuck in my memory.  First, because it had a powerful element of writhing body horror.  And second, because it was so damnably and obviously shortsighted.  Golly, what might happen next?

The infestation in that region worsened, and by August of 2025, with the parasite spreading northward through Mexico, it was clear it was going to breach our southern border.  Flies can fly over walls, after all.

We've scrambled to ramp up sterile male fly dispersal in the US, with nearly four million released weekly along the border, and begun doing the same in Mexico.  Anticipating that boundary being breached, The USDA initiated emergency construction on a new sterile male screwworm production facility in August of 2025, but it's not going to be done until 2027.

Yesterday, the first case of screwworm infestation in sixty years was reported in Texas.    Back before they were eradicated, those flies could spread all the way up to the Canadian border in a hot year.

So that's where we are now.  Who could have predicted it?  Golly.

For a moment, though, let's return to the question of goodness in creation.  A screwfly is a horror, sure, but is it any more horrific than an industrial pig farm?  It's a mindless nothing, as incapable of malice as an earthquake or a forest fire.  It simply exists, and those mortal beings blessed by sentience can find ways to prevent it from doing harm.  In those efforts, and in the blessings of compassion and wisdom, we can find a hint of grace.

Unless, of course, we become so lost in the echo chambers of our ideology and egocentrism that we fail to see the good path before us.