It has come to this: the United States, a nation once capable of landing men on the moon, now deploys flies and dogs to combat a flesh-eating screwworm. The pest, which burrows into living tissue with the subtlety of a Roman legion, has breached the isthmus of Panama and threatens to march north. British biosecurity experts, ever vigilant, are on alert — as if the Channel were not already teeming with invaders of a more bureaucratic sort.
Consider the absurdity. We sterilise male flies by the million, dropping them from aircraft like confetti at a funeral. We train dogs to sniff out infected wounds, their noses twitching at the scent of rotting flesh. This is not a sci-fi dystopia; it is the Department of Agriculture’s latest tactic. The screwworm, a parasite that once plagued the American South, was eradicated decades ago. But like all things forgotten, it returns with a vengeance. The fall of Rome was not one barbarian raid but a thousand small failures. Here, the failure is collective memory.
The irony chokes. In an age of gene-editing and artificial intelligence, we resort to the most primitive of weapons: insect sex and canine olfaction. It is humbling, but do not mistake humility for wisdom. This is decadence. We have allowed our agricultural borders to rot, our surveillance systems to stagnate. And now we play with flies.
For Britain, the lesson is clear. Your own biosecurity is a patchwork of good intentions and underfunded agencies. Imported meat, unregulated travel, climate change: the screwworm is not a tropical curiosity but a harbinger. It will arrive on a lorry, in a suitcase, or on the wind. And when it does, you will not have sterilised flies. You will have committees.
The Victorians understood pests. They built empires on quinine and quarantine. They fumigated ships and quarantined ports with an iron fist. We, by contrast, have developed a pathological tolerance for risk. We call it globalism. We call it free trade. But in the end, it is surrender.
Let us be clear: the fly is a tool, but a desperate one. The dog is a companion, but a fallback. The real war is against complacency. And if history teaches anything, it is that complacency always ends in a scream.
So panic not. The screwworm is slow. But so was the Huns’ advance until it wasn’t. Prepare your kennels and your irradiators. And pray your politicians remember that borders exist for a reason.
