Evaluation of the Mexican-American Screwworm Eradication Program in Mexico
TL;DR — 304 pages on the economics of eradicating a flesh-eating parasite from a continent — one of the most successful and least-known public programmes ever run.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. US federal government work (17 USC §105).
Volume I: Economic Impact from Screwworm Eradication in Mexico. 304 pages.
The screwworm is a fly whose larvae eat living flesh; it devastated North American livestock and killed wildlife and occasionally people. The joint US–Mexican eradication programme used the sterile insect technique — mass-rearing and releasing sterilised males until the wild population could not reproduce — and pushed the fly out of North America entirely.
It is among the most cost-effective public programmes on record, and almost nobody has heard of it. This document is the economic evaluation: what it cost, what it returned, how the benefits distributed between the two countries.
The relevance is not entomological. It is a worked example of a continental-scale technical programme that actually succeeded, with the accounting attached — the rarest combination in public policy, and exactly the thing the Washington Post piece says gets buried.
Where this came from
304 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.