In San Pedro Sula, Honduras, doctors recently found themselves gawking up the nose of a 57-year-old woman named Reina Avila. Avila had writhing screwworms burrowing through her nasal cavity like living, squirming little drills tunneling through her head.
The Telegraph published a harrowing piece by Tom Parry and Simon Townsley on the frightening return of the New World screwworm. The parasite had been wiped out decades ago thanks to a U.S.-backed sterilization campaign, but it’s coming back with a vengeance.
The beast’s scientific name, Cochliomyia hominivorax, literally means “man-eater,” and it’s living up to it. The fly lays eggs on exposed wounds or mucous membranes, the larvae hatch, then dig inward, feeding on living tissue until they’re either surgically extracted or the patient dies.
This Man-Eating Worm is Back—and It’s Already Attacking Humans
Since April, Honduran hospitals have been overrun with cases, most involving the elderly, the sick, the unhoused—society’s most vulnerable. One 19-day-old infant was among the youngest infected.
A man, Pastor Benitez, had over 50 screwworms pulled from a cancerous lesion on his face. A 64-year-old unhoused man named Fabian Aquilar described the sensation of being eaten alive with a wild understatement: “They bite really hard.” If you feel squirming in your seat a little, read his follow-up quote: “I could feel about 10 different worms at one time.”
You can blame this parasite’s overwhelming return on, oddly, organized crime. Specifically, drug cartels that launder money through illegal cattle smuggling. Roughly 800,000 head of cattle are moved yearly from conservation zones like the Rio Platano Biosphere into Mexico, bypassing health controls. Screwworm eggs hitch a ride and bed in the hides of smuggled animals.
Even a fly’s brief touchdown on an open wound, or a nostril, can mean hundreds of eggs deposited in seconds. And while U.S. officials have reignited efforts to mass-release sterilized flies across Mexico, production is a fraction of what it once was.
Rural ranchers like Pedro Matamoros are left battling infestations the old-school way: diesel fuel and lime, which is not significantly better than just letting the worms drill into your brain. Urban victims, like wheelchair-bound Maria Consuelo, who was infected while sitting on her veranda in a gang-controlled neighborhood, have slightly more options than the gasoline cocktail Pedro was using. She’s able to go to the hospital, but there wasn’t a lot they could do.
For now, with little to no US intervention, it seems like the screwworm is going to devour everything in its path. Though those most affected won’t be people in the Honduran upper echelons. It’ll be the nation’s poor, it’s weak, it’s sick, it’s unhoused, it’s elderly. Those whom Honduras and the United States have left behind will be eaten alive.