Ground zero

The United States (US) government plans to drop billions of New World Screwworm fly (NWSFs) from an airplane over Texas next year, after breeding that many of the insect.

The US Department of Agriculture is going to spend $8.5 billion on building a factory where the Cochliomyia hominivorax would be bred, copying one from Panama that can produce 117 million flies per week, CBS News reported. The US factory will produce at least 400 million NWSFs a week.

The NWSF dispersal, which is not new, intends to reduce the population of that fly to prevent it from laying larva that infest cattle and other livestock. The NWSFs to be bred in the US factory are made sterile through radiation and won’t produce the flesh-eating maggots after mating with female NWSFs, according to CBS News.

The pest control method, which is cheaper than spraying insecticide, will be applied for years to gradually minimize the NWSF population and, hopefully, cattle deaths. But it’s not like swarms of flies will fall from the sky and rain down on people, unlike in the home of a woman from San Jose, California.

Kay had been receiving parcels from customers of a Chinese seller on the online marketplace Amazon.

The packages have been arriving for a year now, forcing her to stack the hundreds of boxes in her garage, displacing her car, according to the New York Post.

A NYP photo shows her driveway filled with chest-high boxes. “What you see now is a fraction, because I have refused delivery of more packages than you see here,” she told ABC 7, referring to the photo.

Kay said she filed six complaints with Amazon, but the arrival of packages containing rejected leather car seat covers continued as the China-based Amazon seller Liusandedian listed her address as the US location where customers can return rejected products.

On 9 July, Amazon arrived at Kay’s home, cleared out the packages, apologized to her and assured her that no Liusandedian seat covers will turn up on her doorstep again.