The United States has, for 70 years, been fighting a continuous aerial war against the New World screwworm, a parasite that eats animals alive: cow, pig, deer, dog, even human. (Its scientific name, C. hominivorax, translates to “man-eater.”) Larvae of the parasitic fly chew through flesh, transforming small nicks into big, gruesome wounds. But in the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture laid the groundwork for a continent-wide assault. Workers raised screwworms in factories, blasted them with radiation until they were sterile, and dropped the sterile adult screwworms by the millions—even hundreds of millions—weekly over the U.S., then farther south in Mexico, and eventually in the rest of North America.
The sterile flies proceeded to, well, screw the continent’s wild populations into oblivion, and in 2006, an invisible barrier was established at the Darién Gap, the jungle that straddles the Panama-Colombia border, to cordon the screwworm-free north off from the south. The barrier, as I observed when I reported from Panama several years ago, consisted of planes releasing millions of sterile screwworms to rain down over the Darién Gap every week. This never-ending battle kept the threat of screwworms far from America.
But in 2022, the barrier was breached. Cases in Panama—mostly in cattle—skyrocketed from dozens a year to 1,000, despite ongoing drops of sterile flies. The parasite then began moving northward, at first slowly and then rapidly by 2024, which is when I began getting alarmed emails from those following the situation in Central America. As of this month, the parasite has advanced 1,600 miles through eight countries to reach Oaxaca and Veracruz in Mexico, with 700 miles left to go until the Texas border. The U.S. subsequently suspended live-cattle imports from Mexico.
Central America is shaped like a funnel with a long, bumpy tail that reaches its skinniest point in Panama. Back in the day, the USDA helped pay for screwworm eradication down to Panama out of not pure altruism but economic pragmatism: Establishing a 100-mile screwworm barrier there is cheaper than creating one at the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Even after screwworms began creeping up the tail of the funnel recently, the anti-screwworm campaign had one last good chance of stopping them at a narrow isthmus in southern Mexico—after which the funnel grows dramatically wider. It failed. The latest screwworm detections in Oaxaca and Veracruz are just beyond the isthmus.
The brainworm is calling its allies
ahh yes the Pestilence is in good form but my money is on famine, even though a parlay on war and death together has a big payday. Make your bets folks, scared money don’t make money.
I know this isn’t the time or place. But Death deserves a proper name. It’s a weird hill I preach on since figuring it out.
Death comes for us all.
Pestilence - disease, by virus, bacteria, parasite, prion, etc will lead to death.
Famine - starvation, or dehydration, or simply lack of proper nutrition leads to death.
War - violence, man vs man, for reasons unknown, but entirely human made leads to death.
Death - Leads to death? His name should be something else we fear. And what we fear is related to the above. A few names I propose are Mortality, Age, or just Time - we cannot live forever.
It’s called Entropy and ironically it is also responsible for life.
A wall tends to fall apart (and not the other way around) because these individual pieces have greater degrees of freedom (of movement) than the wall itself. Living beings, through their exchanges with the environment, breathing, consuming and excreting, end up increasing the degrees of freedom of the matter in their vicinity.
In more concise words:
“Life, as a highly organized system, exists in a state of relatively low entropy, while the universe as a whole is constantly moving towards higher entropy (more disorder) according to the second law of thermodynamics. It may seem paradoxical, a violation of a fundamental law of physics, but life actually increases the overall entropy of the universe as it utilizes energy and resources to maintain its own order, eventually releasing waste and heat back into the environment.”
In short, life ultimately increases movement, transformation, decay, disorder and thus death.
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Death and “decay” right? The little dust motes, the stray sock on your chair, the mold in your shower, the grey hair on your head, the new wrinkle near your eye, the new ache in your knee, the yellowing family photos, the moment when you can’t quite remember your nephews name.
The little things that fall apart until that one day you just… stop.
It’s almost like iron age peasants weren’t the best people to write stories about the machinations of the universe
Sorta fun related fact, in the original text Death is actually the only one who has a name at all, the rest have just been inferred based on historical context.
See section “the Pale Horse”
There was once a writing prompts story on reddit. The fifth horseman called Kyle. If anyone can, please repost it here. It was very good.
I vote for him.
Think I found it The prompt itself called him Kyle so not sure which response you had in mind.
This one is the top comment:
That’s the one! Thanks.
Shouldn’t it be “he consulted his 4th brother”? Unless there’s one we don’t know about… yet.
Pestilence, TACO Don and the Ketamine Kid. Just waiting on the fourth horseman. This is shaping up to be an amazing year. :p
As scary as the article makes screworms look, that thing doing the calling is way scarier.
Oh, and the worm that died inside its brain once too.
This explains everything going on in the world