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New York Times
4 days ago
- Health
- New York Times
Avian Flu Wiped Out Poultry. Now the Screwworm Is Coming for Beef.
First came bird flu, which led to the culling of large swaths of the nation's poultry flocks and the soaring egg prices that helped undermine President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s re-election. Now, ranchers in Texas and officials at the Agriculture Department are raising the next alarm: the New World screwworm. Texas livestock producers and ranchers fear the United States is ill-equipped to handle a potential outbreak of screwworm, whose incursion into the country appears increasingly likely. With beef prices already soaring, the screwworm, whose Latin name roughly translates to 'man-eater,' is a real threat, to both cows and the cost of living for America's meat lovers. 'If we wait, we lose,' Stephen Diebel, vice president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, told state lawmakers during a hearing in Austin this week as he pleaded for intervention. The screwworm, like the measles, may have been forgotten by many, but it's not new. And like the measles, which has cropped up in Texas recently, screwworm was once all but eradicated from the United States. Infestations occur when a female fly lays eggs, between 10 and 400 at a time, on a fresh animal wound. Within a few hours, the eggs hatch into larvae that burrow and feed on the flesh. As the wound worsens, it attracts more flies, which lay more eggs. After about a week, adult screwworm flies can reproduce and begin the cycle all over again. The parasitic infection can kill a cow within two weeks if left untreated. There is currently no approved treatment. 'It's like something out of a horror movie,' the Texas agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, said in an interview. He saw distressed cattle infested with screwworm when he was a child in the early 1960s before it was nearly eradicated. 'It's quite a putrid sight,' he said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
These Younger Democrats Are Sick of Their Party's Status Quo
A number of prominent younger Democrats with records of winning tough races are forming a new group with big ambitions to remake their party's image, recruit a new wave of candidates and challenge political orthodoxies they say are holding the party back. Members of the initiative, Majority Democrats, have different theories about how the national party has blundered. Some believe a heavy reliance on abortion-rights messaging or anti-Trump sentiment has come at the expense of a stronger economic focus. Others say party leaders underestimate how much pandemic-era school closures or reflexive defenses of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s re-election bid have eroded voters' trust in Democrats. But the roughly 30 elected officials at the federal, state and local levels who have so far signed on to the group broadly agree that the Democratic Party must better address the issues that feel most urgent in voters' lives — the affordability crisis, for example — and that it must shed its image as the party of the status quo. Many of the group's members have, at times, challenged the party's establishment, something the organization embraces. 'If we don't build this big-tent party that can win majorities,' warned Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota, a leader of the initiative, 'we're on the path of being the party of the permanent minority from a national-election perspective.' Being the anti-Trump party 'might win a midterm election,' Ms. Craig, who is also running in a competitive primary for the Senate, added, 'but it's not going to build lasting majorities. We've got to lay out the case for what we're for as a party.' Majority Democrats is partly a network and convening forum for elected officials to trade best practices, debate and develop ideas. Discussions are underway about how the officials could mobilize politically on one another's behalf, and plans are in the works for public voter-engagement events starting later this summer. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
