Broadsheet

Notion, it’s worth pointing out, has perhaps seen the error of their ways. Apple prominently featured Notion during the Platforms State of the Union technical keynote at WWDC last month, saying, “And apps that previously used cross-platform or web technologies like Notion are migrating their user interface to SwiftUI because they want a level of performance and UI consistency that other technologies can’t deliver.” This, just one year after Rieseberg left for Anthropic. Perhaps Claude will similarly seek to wash the Electron stink off the Claude app eventually. I suspect an Electron codebase is like sap, though — sticky, dirty, and harder to wash off the longer you wait. ↩︎
Before getting promoted to engineering manager in charge of all of Slack’s “desktop” apps, Rieseberg started at Slack as engineering team lead for Windows, which offers an inkling as to his platform taste. ↩︎︎

Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas. Pushed by an unknown force as inexorable as gravity, screwworms moved north — ever moving, ever spreading, ever multiplying, ever destroying. No army ever advanced any more surely or methodically. No army was ever more destructive. Attacking, killing, maiming, and destroying, screwworms literally ate their way north. Reaching upper South Texas, they fanned east and west - all the while moving north - dotting the countryside with the dead carcasses of hapless wildlife, cattle, sheep, and goats, filling the “wormy” pens of farmers and ranchers. - C.G. Scruggs, The Origin of the Screwworm Control Problem

Screwworms completely dominated our life. - T.A. Kincaid Jr., Texas rancher, quoted in The Peaceful Atom and the Deadly Fly

On June 3 of this year, a flesh-eating parasite, the screwworm, was found in a three-week-old calf near the Texas town of La Pryor. Since then, dozens more cases have been discovered in Texas and New Mexico. Outside of a screwworm outbreak in the Florida Keys in 2016 (which was contained), this marks the first screwworm infestation in the US since the 1980s.

Screwworm cases as of July 1st, via the USDA.

Until now, the US has been free of screwworm not due to luck, but because of a decades-long program to eradicate the parasite by breeding it out of existence. By dropping millions of sterile male screwworm flies in an infested area, agricultural agencies can overwhelm the native, fertile male screwworms. Female screwworm flies, who only mate once in their life, will mostly mate with sterile males, producing no living offspring. Drop sterile flies for long enough, and eventually there will be no viable offspring at all, and the pest will be eliminated.

Over the course of several decades, this “sterile male technique” was used by the USDA to eliminate screwworm from the US, Mexico, and Central America. Since the early 2000s a joint US-Panamanian organization, COPEG, has maintained a “screwworm barrier” at the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. Every week, millions of sterile male screwworm flies are dropped over the gap, preventing the screwworms from spreading north from South America (where it remains endemic).

Sometime around 2023, the barrier at Panama failed, and for the last several years screwworm has been marching north. It’s now reached the US. Efforts are underway to eliminate screwworm from North and Central America once again, but it will likely be years before they succeed.

The screwworm eradication program was so effective at eliminating the parasite that we’ve collectively forgotten what an enormous problem it used to be. It’s worth understanding the costs inflicted by screwworm prior to its elimination, how a program emerged for eliminating it, and how control was allowed to lapse.

History of screwworm

New World Screwworm (scientific name Cochliomyia hominivorax) is a species of fly native to the Western Hemisphere. While the larvae (maggots) of most flies feed on dead or decaying tissue, screwworm is unique in that its larvae feed on living tissue. The grisly cycle begins when a screwworm fly lays its eggs on the open wound of an animal. The eggs soon hatch into wriggling white worms, which can grow up to two-thirds of an inch long. These worms burrow into the flesh as they eat their way into the animal, making the wound even worse and attracting even more flies to lay their eggs. After a few days of eating, the worms transform into shell-covered pupae, falling out of the animal and emerging as fully grown flies about a week later. Untreated, a screwworm infestation in an animal is typically fatal.

Since at least the early 19th century, and likely much earlier, screwworm was a miserable fact of life for raising livestock in the Southwestern US. The screwworm fly would find and lay her eggs on even the smallest open wound, and animals had to be inspected for worms constantly. One author notes that “[p]eople would not leave home for more than a day for fear of finding their animals had been eaten alive while they were away. Anyone who didn’t check their animals at least every two days — or have someone do it for them — knew that they would pay a heavy toll in damaged or dead animals.” When worms were inevitably found, they had to be dealt with, typically by applying various insect-killing chemicals, though occasionally by manually removing the worms, a task described as “disgusting and sickening.” Often animals couldn’t be saved — an infection in a horse, for instance, was described in the late 19th century as “typically fatal.” The amount of time and effort required was such that ranchers employed ranchhands whose entire jobs were inspecting animals for screwworm.

Despite efforts to prevent infection, such as by covering animals’ open wounds with tar, screwworm infestations occurred by the millions — in cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and occasionally humans (the first documented screwworm infection in a person in the US dates to the 1830s). One history of the scourge noted that by the early 20th century, infestations had reached “such a disastrous level that it was becoming unprofitable to raise livestock. Producers were forced to hire more and more cowboys to check and treat animals.” A 1935 USDA survey found more than 1.2 million infections and 180,000 dead livestock in Texas alone, with actual totals likely being far higher. A year earlier the USDA estimated that screwworm had killed 1.3 million animals across the Southeast. Some estimates suggested that in the 1930s and 40s, 60% to 80% of white tail deer in Texas were killed by screwworm infections.1

By the 1930s, the situation appeared grim. Screwworms had, by then, found their way into Florida, a climate warm enough that they could survive in the southern portion of the state year-round, spreading up through the southeast during the spring. Prospects for dealing with the pest appeared bleak:

Even with the best efforts of scientists and the use of the latest insecticides, repellents, and liver-baited traps, US livestock producers were losing the war. After more than one hundred years of struggle, the screwworm had spread out of control — and there was no solution in sight. - History of the Mexico-United States Screwworm Eradication Program

Studying the enemy

The toll inflicted by screwworm inspired vigorous efforts to try and combat it. In 1929 the USDA began a screwworm research program at Menard, Texas. This program initially focused on developing better chemical treatments for infections, and would ultimately generate the research that would banish the screwworm from the US.

The first breakthrough occurred thanks to USDA entomologist Emory Cushing. At the time the primary methods to battle screwworm were insecticides to treat infections and traps to capture the flies. After several years of research at Menard, Cushing became convinced that these measures wouldn’t be enough. Believing that something was missing from “the screwworm puzzle,” Cushing applied for a grant to study entomology at the University of Liverpool with Walter Scott Patton, a world expert on flies. Working under Patton, Cushing closely studied the internal structure of different flies, determining for the first time that the screwworm was a unique species with a unique lifecycle. Prior to this, the screwworm fly had often been confused with other, similar flies whose larvae fed on decaying, rather than living, flesh. The identification of screwworm as a distinct species, one whose larvae ate only living flesh, was critical: previous eradication efforts had included using traps baited with carrion to attract flies, but Cushing’s work showed that these efforts were useless. Following Cushing’s discovery, research efforts shifted focus to understanding the screwworm specifically.

In 1931, shortly before Cushing left for England another entomologist, Edward Knipling, joined the USDA. Initially posted at the Menard laboratory in Texas, Knipling was moved to a series of other labs, before eventually arriving at a newly formed lab in Valdosta, Georgia, established in 1934 to help combat the worsening screwworm problem in the Southeast. By then, thanks to Cushing’s research, it had become clear that the screwworm was a unique species, and Knipling and other USDA researchers began studying it more closely to understand and characterize its lifecycle and behavior. This meant watching the flies closely; at one point, Knipling spent every waking hour for a week straight doing nothing but watching screwworms all day. From “The Peaceful Atom and the Deadly Fly:”

He placed a wounded goat in the open. From daylight till dark for a week he watched the goat. Upon seeing a female screwworm fly deposit eggs on the wound in the goat, Knipling would mark her with fingernail polish. He would then watch the marked female and plotted all her activities for the rest of the week if she remained in the area. Day after day, fly after fly, Knipling observed. What time were flies most active? How many eggs were laid? Dozens of questions were asked. Knipling and his fellow workers tried to pry into the very basic life functions of the screwworm.

These studies revealed two important facts about the screwworm. One was that compared to other flies, the number of screwworms in a given area was surprisingly low: later studies eventually put the figure at around 100 flies per square mile. The other was that screwworms would not infect dead animals, only living ones.

In 1935 another young entomologist, Raymond Bushland, joined the USDA and was soon tasked with studying the effects of pesticides on screwworms. This required a steady supply of fresh screwworms, which could only be created by deliberately wounding caged animals allowing them to be infected. Bushland spent his days extracting screwworm pupae from the carcasses of dead rabbits, a task so repulsive that Bushland spent every morning of the first few weeks on the job vomiting.

Desperate to find a way to grow screwworms that didn’t require live animals, Bushland was, after months of work, eventually able to create an artificial growth medium consisting of “hamburger, blood, water, and a little formaldehyde to delay putrefaction.” The disgusting mixture made it much easier to grow screwworms, and before long Bushland was harvesting them by the thousands.

In 1937, Knipling, who had continued to move between various USDA locations, arrived at Bushland’s lab in Texas. Knipling was astounded at the huge number of flies that could be grown in the lab, compared to the relatively small number of flies that seemed to exist in the wild, and he began to ponder whether there might be some way to take advantage of the fact. Bushland’s screwworm husbandry operation also allowed Knipling to confirm a hunch he had from his own observations of the screwworm in the wild: the female screwworm fly only mated once in her life.

As Bushland and Knipling discussed their various observations and discoveries, the outlines of a plan began to emerge. What if you could overwhelm the wild population of screwworm by dumping huge numbers of sterile male flies into an area where cold temperatures had already reduced the number of wild flies? If sterile males greatly outnumbered wild males, most females would mate with sterile males, producing no viable offspring and greatly reducing the size of the next generation. Keep dumping sterile male flies, and eventually the population would simply breed itself out of existence.

It seemed like it would potentially work, but nothing like it had ever been tried before. And it wasn’t obvious how you could produce huge numbers of sterile male flies. After getting ridiculed by their entomologist colleagues — “who ever heard of castrating flies?” — Knipling and Bushland kept the idea to themselves. But the seed had been planted.

The plan to eliminate screwworm

For the next decade, a combination of professional skepticism, lack of obvious sterilization method, and the exigencies of World War 2 prevented much further work on screwworm eradication. At points during the Second World War Knipling continued to toy with models of screwworm population dynamics, and in 1947 he tasked Bushland with investigating chemical methods of sterilizing insects. But no method appeared promising. Without a way of mass-sterilizing the male flies, Knipling and Bushland’s idea was nothing but a pipe dream.

The final piece of the puzzle to eliminate screwworm wouldn’t fall into place until 1950. That year, Knipling read a journal article by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Hermann Muller. Muller had been awarded the prize for his groundbreaking work in genetics, discovering that mutations could be introduced into living things by exposing fruit flies to radiation. Muller’s 1950 article was a warning against the dangers of nuclear war, cautioning that the resulting radioactive fallout could create “a world of sterile human beings.”2 Knipling contacted Muller and asked him if radiation could be used to create large numbers of sterile male screwworms. Muller responded: “I know nothing of screwworms but your theory is sound.”

Invigorated by the Nobel Prize-winner’s vote of confidence, Knipling and Bushland set to work to see if they could use radiation to sterilize screwworms. With no research funds, Bushland dedicated his nights and weekends to the project, finding creative ways to make progress. Muller had done his radiation research using X-rays, but when a local hospital wanted $200 per test to use an X-ray machine, Bushland leveraged his Army connections to use the X-ray machine at a nearby Army hospital for free. The results were promising. Wanting to try an even more powerful radiation source, Bushland was able to convince Oak Ridge National Lab to lend him a sample of highly radioactive cobalt-60, capable of generating gamma rays. Meanwhile, Knipling was eventually able to secure $20,000 in research funds from the Atomic Energy Commission, who were interested in radiation’s effect on fly sterility.

The tests were a success: with a high enough dose of radiation, males were completely sterilized. They survived and would still mate with females, and the females would lay eggs, but the male chromosomes had become so riddled with mutations that the eggs didn’t hatch.

With a method of industrialized screwworm sterilization in hand, the only thing left to do was to try the idea and see if it worked. A USDA team in Florida began working out ways to distribute huge numbers of sterile screwworm flies.

They first tried simply scattering sterilized screwworm pupae on the ground, but this didn’t work: ants and other insects quickly devoured them. Dropping live flies seemed like it would work better, but it would have to be done in an isolated location to see if elimination was really possible — otherwise the area would be continuously reinfested by screwworms from outside the test area. After looking at several possible locations, the team eventually settled on Sanibel Island, a small island near Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf Coast. After a few months of dropping boxes of flies onto the island from a small plane, the number of wild screwworms dropped to virtually nothing. While they couldn’t be eliminated completely — likely because wild flies continued to migrate from the mainland — the results were highly encouraging.

Buoyed by their success, the team began looking for an even larger stage for their next test. By chance, as they were searching, Knipling received a letter from a Dutch agricultural officer recently stationed on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela. The island was overrun with screwworm, and the officer wondered if Knipling had any suggestions for dealing with it. The location seemed perfect, and Curaçao soon became the location of the next test.

Bags of screwworm flies to be dropped over Curaçao, via the USDA.

The Curaçao test began in the summer of 1954. A screwworm production facility, complete with a cobalt-60 gamma-ray source, was set up in Orlando. Sterilized screwworms were flown into Curaçao, then dropped from a small plane in a carefully planned pattern across the island. For the first few weeks, results were poor, with 85% of screwworm offspring still viable. But when the density of dropped sterile flies was raised from 100 to 400 flies per square mile, results quickly improved. Within 14 weeks, no viable offspring could be detected. In November 1954, Curaçao was declared free of screwworm.

Pushing the enemy back

With the success in Curaçao, the USDA was ready to try eliminating screwworms in the US mainland. In 1955 a new, larger screwworm factory was constructed on the outskirts of Orlando, capable of producing two million sterilized flies a week. This new insectary would use a new strain of fly, bred specifically to outcompete wild flies. (The new flies, which had been selected for their high mating frequency, were nicknamed “the sexual athletes”.) Thanks to lobbying from the Florida Cattlemen’s Association, whose members were collectively losing $20 million per year due to screwworm infestations, the Florida legislature allocated $3 million to the eradication program, a figure which was matched by the federal government.

In April of 1958, while screwworms were still confined to the southern half of the state due to an unusually cold winter, USDA planes began dropping sterile screwworm flies over Florida. Flies were first dropped across a 100-mile-wide swath cutting through the center of the state, effectively creating a “barrier” that flies in the southern half of the state wouldn’t be able to penetrate. Inspection stations were set up to prevent the movement of any infected livestock into northern Florida and Georgia, and by July no screwworm cases were being reported north of the quarantine line. The USDA then pushed into south Florida, aided by an even larger screwworm factory in the city of Sebring capable of producing 50 million flies a week, and by September reported screwworm infections in the southeast had dropped to virtually nothing. Over the next several months, the occasional outbreak occurred, but these were dealt with by carpet-bombing the area with ever-higher concentrations of sterile flies. By February of 1959 screwworm cases in the Southeast had dropped to zero.

By the early 1960s screwworms were inflicting more than $100 million worth of damage in the southwest annually. Impressed by the success of the Florida program, ranchers in Texas and the Southwest began clamoring for similar efforts. But Texas would prove to be a much tougher nut to crack than Florida. Unlike Florida, which was surrounded on three sides by water, Texas had no natural barriers preventing screwworm transmission across the 1,000+ mile border that the state shared with Mexico, where screwworms survived year-round. In October of 1959, the USDA issued an official statement that screwworm eradication in the US Southwest did not appear feasible.

But despite the USDA’s official stance, Knipling, Bushland, and a few others in the USDA realized that a strategy used in the Florida eradication program might work in Texas and the Southwest. Florida’s eradication effort began by creating a 100-mile-wide screwworm barrier across the center of the state. This barrier, once in place, had virtually halted the spread of screwworms into the northern half of the state. What if the same thing were done in the Southwest? Create a 100-mile-wide barrier across the entire US-Mexican border. The challenges were many: this barrier would stretch far longer than the one that had been created in Florida and, unlike in Florida, this barrier would have to be continuously maintained. It would also require eliminating screwworm everywhere north of the barrier, a potentially massive undertaking. But not only could this plan eliminate screwworm from the Southwestern US, it could prevent re-infestation of the Southeast, a constant threat that was warded off by an involved, expensive livestock inspection operation.

For the next several years, the official position of the USDA remained that a Southwestern elimination program wasn’t feasible. But eventually the USDA changed its policy, thanks to the efforts of the Southwest Animal Health Research Foundation (SWAHRF), an organization formed by a small group of Texas livestock producers. SWAHRF broke the logjam by raising millions of dollars in voluntary donations from Texas ranchers for screwworm eradication. The show of grassroots enthusiasm convinced the Texas Legislature to allocate money to a Southwest eradication program, which in turn helped convince the federal government to support it. Credit also goes to newly elected Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who owned a ranch, was familiar with the scourge of screwworm, and pulled strings to kickstart the program.

The Southwest eradication program began in February of 1962, when winter temperatures had pushed the screwworm down into Mexico. USDA aircraft began dropping sterile flies across the US-Mexico border to create the North-South barrier. But the effort failed, and before long Texas had been reinfested. There simply weren’t enough flies: sterilized flies were being produced at a small insectary near Kerrville, Texas, at a rate of 20 million per week, but creating an effective barrier would require more than ten times that rate of production.

By spring 1962, construction had begun on the biggest screwworm factory yet, at an abandoned Air Force base near Mission, Texas. Eventually capable of producing more than 200 million screwworm flies a week, the Mission factory was a grotesque marvel of insect-producing efficiency. Operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it was, in essence, a 76,000-square-foot artificial wound. Trays full of meat, blood, and water, each one heated to the exact right temperature to stimulate screwworm growth, moved through the facility on a monorail system timed to the lifecycle of the screwworm. Eggs would be placed in on the trays, hatch into larvae, and collectively feed on the bloody nutrient sludge, creating a “seething mass that is difficult to believe unless you’ve seen and smelled it.” After several days of growth, the larvae would wriggle out of the feed and fall into a water-filled trough, which gently carried them into sawdust-filled trays where they would pupate. The pupae would then be collected into canisters, which in turn were loaded into large casks containing highly radioactive cobalt-60. The irradiated, sterilized pupae were then packed into cartons, loaded into refrigerated trucks, and sent to distribution centers, where they would eventually hatch, be loaded onto planes, and dropped by the millions.

By June of 1962 the Mission factory was fully online, and flies began to be dropped in July. However, the program soon made an unfortunate discovery. It had previously been believed that the maximum range of the screwworm fly was around 35 miles traveled per week. Because the fly only lived for a few weeks, a 100-mile barrier was believed to be sufficient to prevent the passage of migrating flies. However, recent research had shown that in some cases a screwworm could fly much farther — up to 180 miles in a week. Consequently, the barrier would have to be much wider as well: 400 miles. Left with no choice, the USDA ramped up fly production at the Mission factory as fast as possible to support a widened barrier, and an agreement with Mexico was worked out to allow USDA planes to fly hundreds of miles into Mexican airspace to drop sterilized screwworm flies.

The expanded barrier worked. By 1963, the rate of screwworm cases in the US had fallen by 90%. In 1964, they fell even more, and by 1965 the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana were declared screwworm free. California and Arizona soon followed, and by 1966 screwworm had been eliminated from the entire US.

Screwworm barrier circa 1967, via the USDA.

From Mexico to Panama

But the national elimination of screwworm from the mainland United States was hard-won and not easy to maintain. It required continuously dropping millions of sterile male flies across the US-Mexico border to create a screwworm barrier. And no barrier is perfect. Over the next several years screwworm infections continued to crop up in the US, as worms from Mexico found their way into the US. 1972 was particularly bad, when US cases (which had fallen as low as 170 in 1970) surged to more than 95,000 that year.

Screwworm cases in the US and northern Mexico in 1972, via the USDA.

The solution? Push the US barrier even farther south, down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. Not only would this reduce the likelihood of Mexican screwworms reaching the US, it would eliminate screwworm from most of Mexico. And a barrier at Tehuantepec, which was only 118 miles across at its narrowest point, would be far easier to maintain than the nearly 2000 mile barrier across the entire US-Mexican border.

APHIS chart showing the plan to move the screwworm barrier, via the USDA.

In 1972, the US and Mexico signed a Screwworm Eradication Agreement, creating a joint commission to oversee the elimination of screwworm from northern Mexico. A new screwworm insectary, which would eventually produce more than 400 million sterilized flies per week, was built near Tuxtla Gutiérrez in southern Mexico. The factory began producing flies in 1976, and the first flies were dropped on Baja, Mexico that September. Progress was initially slow, but after a program reorganization (which included more livestock inspectors and a new strategy for quickly deploying experts to areas where outbreaks occurred) results improved. By late 1979 the Baja peninsula was free of screwworms, and by 1980 many Northern Mexican states followed. Starting in 1981, the program established a “critical line” across the width of Mexico, marshalling all possible resources to squash any infections that appeared north of it. Over the next several years the critical line was steadily pushed downward, until it reached the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in 1984, one year ahead of schedule.

But establishing a final barrier across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec left something to be desired. Mexican livestock producers below the barrier, who continued to deal with screwworm, complained that the government was favoring northern producers, and hundreds of thousands of livestock that passed from the south to livestock markets in the north, requiring tedious inspection and creating a constant risk of reinfestation. And while the Tehuantepec barrier was much smaller than the US-Mexico one, it still required dropping 150 million sterile flies a week, every week.

Fortunately, an even better location for a barrier existed: the Darien Gap, on the border of Colombia and Panama. At this narrow stretch of land, the barrier would need to be just 60 miles wide. And the densely forested, difficult-to-navigate terrain, which had no roads crossing it, would further hinder the passage of any infected livestock. Pushing the barrier all the way to Panama would also have the benefit of eliminating screwworm not just from the rest of Mexico, but all of Central America as well.

Eradication in Central America posed new challenges: the favorable climate conditions for the screwworm meant that far more flies would need to be dropped per square mile, and new international agreements would need to be signed with each country involved to allow the USDA to fly over their airspace and drop millions of insects. But the benefits would be substantial, and the decision was made to extend the program.

In 1986 the US-Mexico commission signed an agreement with Guatemala, and began dropping flies over the country in 1988. That same year an agreement with Belize was signed, which was followed by agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua in 1991, Costa Rica in 1993, and Panama in 1994. As sterile fly dispersal began across the new territories, screwworm infections in each country quickly fell. In 2006, a new screwworm factory was built in Panama to replace the aging Mexican factory (which had been operating continuously since 1976), opening on the same day that the country was declared screwworm free.

For the next decade and a half, the barrier at Panama held. Administered by a joint US-Panamanian organization called COPEG, the program continued to drop millions of flies a week across the Darien Gap, and employed inspectors to monitor livestock in the surrounding area. When the occasional infestation flared up — in Aruba in 2011, the Florida Keys in 2016 — flies kept in reserve were quickly dispatched, dropped in huge numbers to quash any spread.

Flightpath of screwworm dispersal flights in Panama, via Skoda et al 2017

The barrier falls

At some point in the last few years, screwworms broke through this barrier.

Recent screwworm cases in Central America, via Valdez-Espinoza et al 2025.

In 2021, screwworm cases were confirmed within the Darien Gap area in Panama, and Panama was added to the list of countries where screwworm is confirmed by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Initially, this didn’t appear concerning: since 2001, Panama has had occasional small screwworm outbreaks in the Darien Gap area. But in 2022, screwworm was detected in Panama beyond the barrier at the Darien Gap. Though initially this was just a few cases, the infestation quickly spread: in 2023 there were 6,500 screwworm cases in Panama, and cases were detected in nearby Costa Rica. By 2024 screwworm had spread to every Central American country, as well as Mexico; there were 18,000 detected cases in Panama, 8,600 in Costa Rica, and 3,300 in Nicaragua. In 2025, total cases in Mexico rose to over 12,000, and as of this writing have exceeded 30,000.

It’s not 100% clear what caused the breach, and most sources point to a confluence of different factors. The disruption caused by COVID-19 seems to be partly to blame: during the pandemic livestock inspectors were forced to stay home, vehicles broke down and couldn’t be repaired due to a lack of replacement parts, and power outages in the screwworm plant killed millions of sterilized flies.

Another issue seems to be large-scale movement of both people and livestock. Starting in 2021, the number of migrants passing through the Darien Gap skyrocketed. Illegal cattle trafficking also likely played a role. Ranchers throughout Central America will illegally graze cattle on protected forests, often as part of a larger money-laundering operation for narcotics cartels. These cattle are then illicitly moved north to livestock markets in Mexico. It’s been estimated that hundreds of thousands of cattle are trafficked through Central America each year, and the speed at which screwworms have spread through the region suggests they’re moving by truck, being carried by infected cattle.

Also contributing are the changing circumstances in the Darien Gap itself. When the barrier was established the Darien Gap was a wild, untamed rainforest. Today that forest is increasingly being cut down and replaced with grassland for cattle to graze on, making it much easier for a screwworm infection to spread through the area. Amplifying this risk is the fact that many ranchers are absentee owners, people who treat the ranch as something of a vacation property without closely monitoring its operations.

The USDA didn’t simply sit back in response to this spate of outbreaks in Central America. APHIS drew on hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funding in 2023 and 2024, and began dropping sterile flies in infected countries. Cattle imports from infected countries ceased, (though they later reopened in a limited fashion with increased inspection protocols). Fly production at the Panama facility was ramped up from 20 million flies a week to more than 100 million. But these efforts were nowhere near enough to stop the spread. The facility at Panama could produce enough flies to maintain a dense, narrow barrier of sterilized flies at the Darien Gap, but not to fight an infestation which had spread widely throughout Central America; at the peak of Central American operations in the 1980s and 1990s, over 400 million flies were being produced weekly.

New screwworm facilities are coming online — in 2026 the USDA broke ground on a facility at Moore Air Force Base in Texas meant to produce 300 million flies a week, and is converting an existing fruit fly insectary in Mexico to produce screwworms. And earlier this year APHIS announced a $100 million “Grand Challenge” for projects related to screwworm eradication or treatment. (Some anti-screwworm efforts may have been hindered by DOGE, which cut APHIS staff, screwworm monitoring programs, and may have delayed funding for the Mexico facility, but it’s hard to be confident about this, and the administration has unsurprisingly rejected these claims.)

Overall, the reemergence of screwworm seems like it’s being taken quite seriously, and if this level of investment is maintained it seems likely we’ll be able to re-eradicate it from the US and Central America. But this will probably take “close to a decade of sustained work:” bringing new production facilities online, and dropping millions of sterile flies over the infected areas week after week, month after month, year after year as the pest is gradually pushed back.

Conclusion

Overall, the screwworm program seems like a classic case of something becoming a victim of its own success: a problem got solved so thoroughly that we forget how big of a problem it was, and we gradually undermine the conditions that made the solution possible. Prior to the push of screwworms all the way south to Panama there were a series of other screwworm eliminations that only partly solved the problem: eliminating it in Florida and the Southeast didn’t do anything for the livestock in the Southwest, and required an involved inspection regime to keep screwworm entering from the rest of the country. Pushing the pest population down to Mexico required continuously dropping hundreds of millions of flies over an enormous, 400-mile-wide barrier that was frequently breached. The barrier at Tehuantepec left much of Mexico still exposed to screwworm, and was expensive to maintain.

The barrier at Panama, by contrast, worked amazingly well and cost only $15 million per year to operate. As a result of this success, other screwworm facilities were shut down (the Tuxtla factory closed in 2012, against the protests of COPEG), and production at Panama gradually declined to the level needed to maintain the barrier and not much else. Barrier conditions in the Darien Gap were allowed to deteriorate, the dense rainforest replaced with grassland occupied by ranchers paying insufficient attention to their herds. What had once been very thorough cattle inspection processes were allowed to lapse: one article notes that in Panama ranchers, veterinarians, and trade organizations became less diligent about inspecting cattle prior to shipping them, and that “a carbon copy of all these issues happened in every country all the way to Mexico.” And when it was clear that screwworms had breached the barrier, responses were sometimes delayed by political disputes — Mexico apparently initially made it very difficult for USDA screwworm flights to operate until the US Agricultural Secretary called to force the issue.

Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to re-learn how much of a problem screwworm was the hard way.

Per the USDA, economic losses from screwworm in the 1930s were estimated to be between $5 and $10 million per year (about $120–240 million per year in 2026 dollars), though others give much higher estimates. C.G. Scruggs, former chairman of the Southwest Animal Health Research Foundation, estimates $30 million a year in losses in the 1930s in wild deer alone.

Muller’s insistence that there was any level of radiation, however small, could induce mutations is responsible for the Linear No-Threshold model of radiation damage, and the subsequent “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) policy for radiation exposure at nuclear power plants.

Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week.

Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.

I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.

The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.

So if you haven’t, go read the text of the Declaration. It isn’t long (but don’t skip!). My thoughts at present don’t necessarily fit together neatly, so we’ll break them down under a few major headings.

The signed copy of the Declaration of Independence displayed in the National Archives in Washington D.C., engrossed by Timothy Matlack.

A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind

When I was growing up, one of the things it was fashionable to argue was that the American Revolution was a ‘conservative’ revolution, in that it did not overturn the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies. Conservatives said this about the revolution to claim it for their own and to distinguish it as the ‘good’ revolution in contrast to those ‘bad’ revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Leftists sometimes did the opposite, terming the revolution ‘conservative,’ unlike ‘real’ revolutions which upended social and economic patterns more completely. And there’s not nothing to this: the revolution did not immediately challenge the socio-economic systems of the Thirteen Colonies (though the notion that the revolution was fundamentally pro-slavery is, at best, quite overstated; it was certainly not an anti-slavery revolution, either, of course).

I think both positions however, are fundamentally wrong, however, in that they miss the inherent radicalism of the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, the framers themselves seem to have only imperfectly understood the course of the rock they were about to set rolling. But they very well understood the momentousness of it.

Now there’s a tendency at this point to jump right to, “We hold these truths…” but let’s start at the beginning.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The introduction of the Declaration doesn’t begin with self-evident truths, but rather an assertion that the action of the Declaration demands explanation, that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” The framing speaks to the radicalism of what the authors (we tend to think of Jefferson as the sole author, but the finished Declaration was very much a creature of committee) are about to do, so radical that decency and respect requires them to explain themselves, not merely to the colonies or to the British Empire but to “mankind.”

The contrast with many similar documents is striking to me. Of course a lot of national declarations declare causes and aims of an action, but in my own – admittedly incomplete – survey, it is quite rare that any imagines that all of mankind needs to be informed. To jump back to the previous examples, Magna Carta calls to witness only John, his subjects and God. The Declaration of the Rights of Man makes its declaration before the “supreme being.” And that makes sense – there is, on some level, no need to inform mankind about those documents, because they pertain only to the people of specific countries (although the Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly has universalist aims).

By contrast, the authors of the Declaration seem very clear-eyed that they are about to make some claims with global, universal significance, that the collection of apple carts they are about to upset is rather larger than just their own. As we’re going to see, they’re right – because they’re not asserting the peculiar rights of Englishmen or British subjects, but rather making an argument about a set of universal rights and principles which might shake thrones and crack crowns the world over. That warning and assumption of responsibility – that the authors understand that the magnitude of their claims here require an explanation – is what leads into the bombshells of the preamble, though the introduction has already tipped its hand to one of them (that a “people” are entitled to a “separate and equal station” and thus able, on their own, to rightly dissolve the bonds that tie them with another).

The Radicalism of the Preamble

That stage-setting swiftly leads us into the Preamble.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

In the United States, at least, I think we hear these words so often as kids that we lose the sense of their importance and radicalism or even of their plain meaning, the way that if you speak any word enough times over again in a row it starts to feel like gibberish. So what is the preamble saying and why?

Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.

That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.

The argument begins with two assertions. The first is a natural law assertion of an equality of rights among men, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is a claim of striking magnitude and remarkable finality – indeed, a claim of such magnitude that it very obviously conflicted with the practice of slavery in the colonies, something some of the framers recognized and then most shamefully did almost nothing about. The Declaration could have asserted those unalienable rights are being particular – to British subjects or Englishmen or Christians, perhaps – but it does not. Instead it insists upon their universality through an argument to natural law, a sensible choice for Thirteen Colonies that already had a multiplicity of faiths and ethnicity in them. Again, if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).

We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.

It seems relevant in this context to note that the United States remains, culturally, an extremely individualistic society (arguably the most so) and it is hard not to see that as both cause and effect of the Declaration’s position here.

The second assertion then follows on the first – drawing from John Locke’s theory of the social contract, the Declaration asserts that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is, as we’ve discussed many times, untrue as a matter of historical fact – states emerge as violence-machines, not as machines for the protection of rights. But as an aspirational statement, that governments and states ought to have the protection of rights as their primary purpose, ought to derive their powers from the consent of the governed, it is a powerful statement.

It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.

The next two points then serve as conclusions which follow these two initial assertions: if individuals have unalienable rights and if governments exist to protect those rights then (this is the third point) a government which fails to protect those rights loses its legitimacy and may be disestablished and therefore (the fourth point) a “long train of abuses and usurpations” can justify revolution.

In short, a government – and it is striking here that the Declaration uses the king as synecdoche (part-for-the-whole) for the whole British government – which greatly fails in its duty of protecting rights loses its legitimacy. Once again, the authors seem to sense how radical that claim is and so they qualify it, making clear that such a decision isn’t to be taken lightly (and it isn’t likely to be taken lightly). The failure of the government in question to protect rights must be extreme to justify the radical cure of revolution, a position which will set up the bill of grievances that make up the actual bulk of the Declaration’s text (but which everyone skips – we shall not).

But before we move to the bill of grievances, I want to take one more chance to push back against the idea that the Declaration is just something ‘small ball’ or something that only mattered for the United States.

The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.

The Bill of Grievances

Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”

Some of the particular grievances have less relevance today (particularly the incitement of war with American Indians), but many of them remain relevant – it isn’t hard in many cases to see specific parts of the Constitution designed to forbid particular grievances from the list.

There’s a tendency to skip over the bill of grievances when reading the Declaration in dramatic readings or classroom contexts and one understands why: compared to the philosophical firebombs of the preamble or the emotional punch of the conclusion, the bill of grievances is rather long and less exciting. But I think it is important because it provides a sense of what kind of government the framers thought might constitute tyranny.

And I must admit it was in this sense that I have been thinking about this document for the past year, because, as I have argued before, I think we are facing a government not merely that I disagree with – that’s not at all new and democracy must mean losing elections as well as winning them – but rather a government, particularly an executive branch, which does aim for “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” in a way that is peculiar to any administration, democratic or republican, that I can think of.

So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

As the Declaration itself says, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

What is the Fourth of July For?

The Fourth of July (for Americans) is more than just a day to shoot off fireworks, have parades and cookouts. It is also more than just a day to reflect on the United States’ achievements, which are considerable.

It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.

The Declaration is a document that declares, after all, that “all men are created equal.” It does not admit caveats. It does not say “all men, except for the immigrants” – indeed, the opposite, it charges George III with the abuse of “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Someone seeking to defend the Declaration against all immigration or the extension of natural rights to foreigners is trying to defend the Declaration against itself, against its own values; they are actually at war with the Declaration (just as the Confederates were), though they might not admit it.

It does not say, “all men, except for that religion I don’t like.” Indeed, no less than George Washington makes this point clear in the nature of the Constitution – the ‘user’s manual’ for achieving the aims of the Declaration – that it “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” One cannot help but notice that its formulations, “their Creator” and “Nature’s God” are expressly ecumenical – of course quite a few of the framers were deists or otherwise not very religious and it is worth noting that the founders also had no problem respecting Muslims.

Indeed, it is striking to me that while the Declaration in its ideals warmly embraces the immigrant, the fellow with an unfamiliar religion, the families with different lifeways, what is truly foreign to it is the notion that the United States is just some other blood-and-soil nation, that there are ‘heritage Americans’ or that the unalienable rights it asserts do not extend to some people. The authors and signers of the Declaration were brave enough, confident enough in their ideals to say all men; let us be at least half as brave to keep saying all men.

It is a document that demands of us, that demands us to be better, to strive to fulfill its lofty ambitions, to demand our government so strive. To pledge, as the signers did, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to its principles and the preservation and expansion of the liberties that and subsequent generations won.

The Fourth of July is a day for us to remember what kind of people we are supposed to be and to rededicate ourselves to coming a little closer, inch by inch, to the grand vision on which our country was founded and in so doing perhaps function as a lighthouse guiding other countries as well to a freer future.

Happy Fourth of July. It has been 250 remarkable years. That tremendous legacy is now bequeathed to us and we are duty bound to see these ideals carried forward for another 250 years. Let us, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, pledge our sacred Honor to that.

Jurisdiction	Representative donor benefits	Legal classification / routing
United States	Nontransferable gift cards; sweepstakes (e.g., Super Bowl LX trip; $5,000–$7,000 raffles); promotional items (shirts, mugs, bags, movie tickets).	“Volunteer donor” label retained where benefits are not readily convertible to cash; sweepstakes framed as “no donation necessary.”
South Korea	Promotional K-pop photo cards; vendor and restaurant vouchers (5,000–8,000 won); merchandise; transferable blood-donation card.	Prohibited “consideration” distinguished from “commemorative gifts” and donor encouragement.
Kazakhstan	~$18.75 (2 MCI) for reimbursable donation; ~$2.34 meal equivalent for gratuitous donation.	Categorized as payment; reimbursable donation invited for shortages and rare types.
Bulgaria	Payment in narrow statutory cases (shortage, vaccine/serum/immunoglobulin production, research/diagnostics).	Voluntary/unremunerated rule with “against payment” exceptions.
Germany	Direct monetary transfers at some collection centers; refreshments and health checks only at DRK.	“Aufwandsentschädigung” (expense allowance), set per collection service.
China	Family exam-point awards (Pujiang: 1–3 points); platelet shopping cards $31–$386; paid leave, tax benefits; prepaid phone/transport cards, movie tickets.	“Gratuitous” system plus “appropriate subsidies”; tolerated monetary-equivalent and family-directed rewards.
South Africa	Data/streaming vouchers, raffles, merchandise; private wellness rewards (Discovery Vitality, Momentum, Bonitas).	Donor benefits supplied through blood-service promotions and private wellness programs.
Brazil	One paid day off per 12 months (private employees); donation-day leave (public servants); 120-day priority service at banks, hospitals, etc.	Donation converted into paid-leave entitlement and legally recognized priority status.
Spain	Donor medals, honors, and milestone recognition.	Recognition-based; no direct monetary transfer.
India	Replacement donation; illicit “professional donor” cash market.	Patient-side payment associated with replacement donation.
Nigeria	Tokens, certificates, badges, transport refunds; in practice 68% family replacement and 12.2% commercial donors.	Patient-side payment associated with replacement donation; commercial donors openly reported in donor categories.
Sierra Leone	Predominantly family replacement donors (~90%); paid donors recorded as replacement donors.	Patient-side payment associated with replacement donation; paid donors recorded as family replacement donors.
Argentina	Post-donation meal; medical certificate; 24-hour work-absence justification; 2026 shift away from replacement model.	Statutory donor benefits plus replacement-donation phase-out.

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What is the Fourth of July For?

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Religion has always been vital to the region of Western North Carolina, from traditional Cherokee beliefs to modern multi-campus church complexes. Here, faith is more than a conviction; it’s a way of life.

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