This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized by radiation (females only mate once in their lifetime so their population falls off fast). There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

Edit: Hah, I get to eat my words. Turns out USDA and APHIS have been trying to fly planes over Mexico to release the sterile flies, but the Mexican government has been restricting the flight days and denying landing permission, which has hampered the program. Looks like the Mexican bureaucracy is the one failing here, and USDA/APHIS might be running pre-emptive releases in the US (but I can't find a source on that). They just agreed to lift those restrictions and cooperate more at the end of April.

This topic always leads me back to reading about the Darién Gap [0]. When eradication was working successfully, they had managed to push the screwworm population all the way back to the Gap and keep it out of major population/agriculture areas. There were (or are) yearly efforts to perform the sterile insect technique [1]. Expensive to perform, but worth it for all the damage they'd otherwise cause if left unchecked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique

More on the screwworm barrier and how it was established. This is one of my favorite “magazine style” feature stories.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

>Outside a bar in southern Arizona in 1890, a stagecoach driver stumbled into the night and fell asleep in the open air, unknowingly becoming host to hundreds of screwworms while passed out drunk. The parasitic insects made their way through his nose, into his throat, and eventually killed him — a grim but once relatively common occurrence.<

From

"Screwworm eradication lessons from a longtime veterinarian"

https://www.agdaily.com/livestock/screwworm-eradication-less...

An excellent article on the realities of screwworm in USA. It also speaks of topical treatments! Unfortunately though and to our great loss no doubt, it does not go into detail about "the scrotal area post castration" of unsnap_biceps fascination on these posts nor "lambs ...licking the topically applied ivermectin" so titillating to 8note. (FWIW ivermectin pour-ons contain ethanol.)