"The first, and to-date largest, documented infestation of C. hominivorax myiasis outside of the Americas occurred in North Africa from 1989 to 1991. The outbreak was traced to a herd of sheep in Libya's Tripoli region, which began suffering screwworm attacks in July 1989; over the following months, the myiasis spread rapidly, infecting numerous herds across a 25,000 km2 area. Eventually, the infested region spanned from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahara Desert, threatening the more than 2.7 million animals susceptible to C. hominvorax that inhabited the area. More than 14,000 cases of large-scale myiasis due to the C. hominivorax species were documented. Traditional control methods using veterinary assessment and treatment of individual animals were insufficient to contain the widely dispersed outbreak, so the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization launched a program based on the sterile insect technique.[10] About 1.26 billion sterile flies were produced in Mexico, shipped to the infested area, and released to mate with their wild counterparts. Within months, the C. hominvorax population collapsed; by April 1991, the program had succeeded in eradicating C. hominivorax in the Eastern Hemisphere. This effort, which cost under US$100 million, was among the most efficient and successful international animal health programs in UN history."
Incredible!
It's also striking how much these efforts were made harder by US foreign policy and involvement in the wars of Central America, and are still made hard because of our poor relationship with Cuba.
Cuba and the Soviet Union started insurgencies in several countries in Central America. Blaming the US for its attempts to counter this is disingenuous.
That is the easy part. There is a good model for shared infrastructure - a private corporation is established, all the local companies buy a share then the shared company builds, owns and operates the actual infrastructure. The same thing works for funding long-term research in everyone's best interest. A shared research corporation that all the local businesses can buy into. They can be guilted in to a small contribution and the research can happen at a slow-burn to generate results over time.
To me the bigger challenge is who would pay for dumping large numbers of irradiated bugs.
This is wrong, harmful effects of radiation on cells, that it causes mutations and makes things sterile, were known long before WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller#Discover... They basically just put a lot of fruit flies under X-ray radiation and recorded the effects.
The description "from the horrific consequences of atomic bombs dropped on Japan" is written and reads as nonessential, meaning it goes without saying but is nevertheless helpful in qualifying how "scientists now knew" within context of the article's chronological prose.
I understood the parent's remark as rejecting this factual inaccuracy.
[0] https://m.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-in...
