Wellness, Actually with Emily Oster & Perry Wilson, MD
Jun 18, 2026 · 58 min · 24 segments
This week, Emily and Perry tackle the weirdest, most wonderful thing all living things do: sleep. If evolution has forced us to be completely vulnerable for eight hours at a stretch, there must be a…
Emily OsterHostThis is a special health news because my intrepid co-host, Emily, is on vacation.
I've been getting a lot of questions about screw worm and the screw worm response lately.
So what's going on with this invasive species? A couple of things that people need to know about screw worm.
And unlike most fly larvae, they eat living flesh instead of dead or decaying tissue.
And so these flies will come and lay hundreds of eggs near an open wound or another insect bite or near a sensitive part, typically of cattle, like around the eyes or nose.
And when the maggots hatch, they start eating the living tissue, which can lead to secondary infection and death.
The screwworm was eradicated in the U.S. in 1982 and over the following decade was pushed all the way south through Central America and past Panama.
June 3rd, 2026, just a couple of weeks ago, there was the first case in the US, which was in Texas.
The women, the Um, and, uh, they store that sperm and lay multiple clutches of eggs over, uh, you know, over the next months and things like that, but they only made that one time.
And so what the USDA had been doing is breeding these sterile male flies and releasing them into the wild.
This is a special health news because my intrepid co-host, Emily, is on vacation.
I've been getting a lot of questions about screw worm and the screw worm response lately.
So what's going on with this invasive species? A couple of things that people need to know about screw worm.
And unlike most fly larvae, they eat living flesh instead of dead or decaying tissue.
And so these flies will come and lay hundreds of eggs near an open wound or another insect bite or near a sensitive part, typically of cattle, like around the eyes or nose.
And when the maggots hatch, they start eating the living tissue, which can lead to secondary infection and death.
The screwworm was eradicated in the U.S. in 1982 and over the following decade was pushed all the way south through Central America and past Panama.
June 3rd, 2026, just a couple of weeks ago, there was the first case in the US, which was in Texas.
The women, the Um, and, uh, they store that sperm and lay multiple clutches of eggs over, uh, you know, over the next months and things like that, but they only made that one time.
And so what the USDA had been doing is breeding these sterile male flies and releasing them into the wild.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.