From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Feb 21 2003 - 17:07:10 MST
< http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2267001@
Grisly Mexico Factory Breeds Man-Eating Flies
Fri February 21, 2003 10:17 AM ET
By Elizabeth Fullerton
TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Tucked away in southern Mexico's
jungly Chiapas state, scientists work around the clock using radiation and
powdered blood to produce one of the area's most cutting-edge exports --
man-eating flies.
Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, better known for spawning an
armed rebellion in 1994 by guerrillas fighting for Indian rights, is home
to the world's only New World screwworm plant, breeding millions of insects
each week.
Named for the corkscrew motion with which they burrow into flesh, the
screwworm larvae can kill their victim -- human or animal -- in five days.
The worm's Latin name, cochliomyia hominivorax, means "fly that devours men."
"They feed off fresh blood, not dead tissue as other species do. That's why
they are extremely dangerous. It's very hard for an animal to defend itself
against something like that," said Alfredo Alvarez, a biologist at the plant.
In the 1950s, U.S. scientists pioneered a strange but effective way of
eradicating the pests. The flies are zapped with high doses of radiation to
sterilize them then released into the wild to mate with their fertile
counterparts.
The females only mate once, so if they do so with the sterile flies, they
will not reproduce.
Using this technology, the United States by 1982 wiped out the bug that had
threatened swathes of the nation's livestock.
With the aim of gradually eradicating the worm from the American continent,
the fly-producing factory in southern Mexico was started in 1976 by a joint
U.S.-Mexican government commission and by 1992 Mexico was declared free of
the screwworm.
But there have been recurrences in Mexico recent years, some, ironically,
due to errors at the fly factory that allowed millions of the killer flies
to escape.
Machine failure at the plant caused an outbreak of the disease in January
that Alvarez described as a "disaster."
But thanks to the 27-year-old plant, the flies have been mostly wiped out
in the southern United States, Mexico, Libya and across most of Central
America.
In the early 1990s, Mexico exported the flies to Libya, which was
contaminated by South American cattle imports.
The U.S.-Mexican commission is now selling its unusual product to Panama
and Jamaica, where what look like cardboard lunch-boxes packed with black
buzzing flies are dropped from planes to rid those areas of the
bloodthirsty insect.
VITAL ORGANS
A fetid, overbearing stench of decay -- the odor from the waste that about
90 million flies produce each week -- hits a visitor on arrival at the fly
plant.
It pervades clothing, hair and nostrils long after one leaves the plant,
despite obligatory rigorous showering.
Security is tight. All visitors and personnel are given clean overalls and
boots for entering the production area, which is locked after them and has
no windows.
In the so-called "fly colony," a loud buzzing emanates from row upon row of
metal cages where thousands of fertile flies are kept alive and fattened
for breeding.
To the untrained eye, they resemble common house flies with blue-green
bodies but these have bulging orange eyes.
After seven days, the flies are mature enough to lay their eggs and are
taken to a darkened room. They lay their eggs along long wooden sticks
smeared with a gel that to them smells similar to a wound. The fly's
average life cycle is 20 days.
One fly can lay up to 400 eggs in a wound. Within 24 hours these hatch into
larvae and begin burrowing into the meat.
In two days, an open sore in an eye, for example, will turn into a
grapefruit-sized festering wound of raw, pulpy flesh. The larvae eat their
way toward the victim's vital organs.
"If the wound is in the stomach, they'll try to get to the liver or
intestines. If it's in the head, they'll attack the eyes, the ears. They
can reach the brain and then it's adios," said Alvarez, who is employed by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
The worm comes in two species -- the New World screwworm, native to the
Western Hemisphere, and the Old World screwworm, found in Southeast Asia,
the Middle East and parts of Africa.
TRICKING THE WORMS
In the incubation room, live wounds are mimicked in racks of hundreds of
trays, using a brown gel containing powdered blood, milk and egg among
other ingredients.
Workers scrape the fly eggs off the wooden sticks and deposit them in these
trays on top of a piece of paper towel.
As they hatch into larvae, tiny white grubs begin to swarm over the brown
muck. "They are totally convinced they are attacking a warm animal," said
Alvarez.
Within 48 hours, the grubs have grown fatter and their diet must be
replenished. "This is equivalent to a worm moving to another zone of the
body to find fresh flesh," said Alvarez.
From a distance, the huge trays resemble baking trays of brownies but at
close range the mixture bubbles with the gouging and squirming of around
20,000 worms per tray.
By the third day the trays brim with thick brown-red goo as more gel is
added to satisfy the worms' rapacious appetite. The smell is at its most
rancid.
As they reach maturity, the grubs jump out of the trays, falling into
funnels where they are scooped up and poured by the thousands into trays
with sawdust covering them. They are left for 24 hours to develop a shell
and become pupae.
After five and a half days the pupae are put in plastic cylinders and
exposed to around two minutes of radiation. The amount of radiation is 11
times the minimum needed to kill a human being but the flies are tough.
Once they have been irradiated, the pupae are placed in ice coolers to slow
the process of their maturing into flies.
The high-tech plant, a rarity in the impoverished and heavily agricultural
state of Chiapas, exports the "chilled flies" twice-weekly to Panama and
Jamaica.
INVASION OF THE FLIES
The United States now plans to build a plant in Panama to create a sterile
fly barrier against flies from South America.
But the story has its failures too.
Despite stringent security procedures such as numerous fly traps in and
outside the plant, special clothing and the stationing of boxes of sterile
flies around the perimeter to mate with fertile escapees, there have been
outbreaks.
Last month, the plant had its worst ever when a radiation machine
malfunctioned. Millions of fertile flies were sent into the wild in Mexico
and Panama. To date 50 cases of the disease have been found in animals in
Panama and 44 in Chiapas.
The damage could escalate and take months to repair.
"It's a disaster for us. We're on national alert," said Alvarez. "The
outbreak gives us an inkling of what could happen if the flies were used as
a biological weapon in a terror attack. It could be very dangerous."
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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