Word: screwworms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...determine wear in metals. In more than 1,700 U.S. hospitals, radiation is used to diagnose disease, treat cancer and tumors, preserve tissue and blood vessels in banks. It has caused mutations in seeds that produce bigger and better crops, been used to destroy such longtime pests as the screwworm, preserved food indefinitely. Nuclear power is already propelling submarines...
Worst plague of Florida cattle is a large bluish fly called the screwworm. The adult female lays eggs on wounds or scratches! and the eggs hatch into maggots that literally eat the victim alive. Screwworm maggots can kill a full-grown steer in less than ten days. But last week, with the enthusiastic approval of cattlemen, planes were scattering millions of live screwworm flies over Florida rangelands...
Tried out in 1954 on the West Indian island of Curaçao, the scheme exterminated the island's flies in less than a year (TIME. Feb. 7, 1955). Last spring the USDA and the Florida Livestock Board set up a million-dollar screwworm factory at Sebring, Fla. The fierce, legless maggots are fed on 80,000 Ibs. a week of mixed whale and horse meat flavored with 4,500 gals, of beef blood. When they get their growth and turn into pupae, they are harvested, packed into aluminum canisters, and exposed for 6-2 minutes to gamma rays...
Sweating in the summer heat, the candidates whooped through receptions, rallies, teachers' meetings, radio and TV stations, livestock markets, transit garages, factory shift changes, military bases, even (for Holland) a screwworm-eradication plant. According to Pepper, Democrat Holland, 66, was a "Rip van Winkle" who "is asleep most of the time and looks backward when he is awake." According to Holland, Pepper, 57, was a "radical, Communist sympathizer, socialist-trend thinker, Red, ultraliberal." On one big campaign issue, integration, there was no issue: Spessard Holland is an avowed segregationist; Claude Pepper noisily declaimed that he, too, opposes the Supreme...
Your March 10 account of Entomologist R. C. Bushland's method of reducing the population of screwworm flies [by breeding sterile males] reminds me of the conceit that...