Oh God help us. Seriously.
And am I the only one with a tin hat this morning thinking modified ticks and NWSW in the same brainwaves?
@Baymule smart move on having the screw worm spray ahead of time. Thinking I'll be getting some as well. We're 55 from here to Mexico (Baja peninsula) - though I don't know anything about the status of NWSW in Baja.
No, you are not the only one with a tin hat thinking... The explosion of spread of the Alpha Gal syndrome has even some of the "experts stumped"... I believe there has been some "help" to make some of these things spread faster and farther...
On top of that, we keep bringing in other "pests"... Like the Asian Long horn tick.... spreading this thelariosis in the beef cattle... never heard of it 10 years ago... Now it is in most every herd along the Interstate corridors and many places due to travel of the cattle trucks.
Look at the DA#@%D Spotted Lantern fly and how far and fast it has traveled, here in the east.
The NWSW has been around for a long time... when it was first stopped in the late 60's-70's... the range was pushed back down in central America to what was called the Darien Gap.... lower tip of Panama... and was kept there pretty much using the sterile male fly technique. We used to produce more than we do now... things got Lax, it "stayed put"... and we were okay. Cattle movement has increased dramatically in 50 years, and it has been creeping up and suddenly it is 200 miles and we close the border to Mexico... But it is too late when there is not enough production of the sterile males to counteract the number of females and the area that it has expanded to.
Now it has been found in cattle, dogs, goats, hogs, and some other mammals....
I believe one person has been found with it and has been treated...
Years ago, not only the cowboys were on the ranges checking the cattle... but many times the cattle were run through the dipping vats... which basically swam the cattle through arsenic or other concoctions, to eradicate the ticks that caused the tick fever in cattle... and lice and other surface pests.... and sheep were also run through for elimination of ticks and lice and such under the fleeces...
Maybe not such a great thing, but they were doing what they could at the time to stop the animals from being decimated by ticks... and you know this also would stop any other pest that crawled on the bodies of these animals...
I am sure that this helped to keep in check some of the things like NWS infestations, even if they didn't know what all the animals might have.
We don't use the pesticides like we used to, and that is basically good... many were pretty potent poisons. But they may have been partly to the credit of keeping some of these other diseases at bay also...
but if I do, there will probably be a big drain on supply and I won't be able to get it. The active ingredient is permethrin which is a natural fly repellant and killer. If we all run out, I wonder if kerosine would work? I think kerosine and pine tar was once used for hoof infections in horses. While a lot of those old remedies were pretty toxic, it was better than nothing and a lot of them worked better than today's "safe" methods.
