|
|
|
|
|||
|
| |||
science, health & technology
Also in this section:
Left to right: COPEG technical aide Harold C. Hofmann, US Ambassador William A. Eaton and COPEG director general José Dimas Espinosa G., at the sterile screw worm fly factory that's under construction in Pacora. The plant will be finished sometime in the middle of this year, but the urgency for the American ambassador and the Panamanian agriculture minister to visit now was driven by a political need to demonstrate to skeptical farmers that the United States is not indifferent to Panamanian agricultural health concerns. Photo courtesy of the American Embassy
Biological pest control plant nears
completion Tens of millions of dollars... to raise bugs? That's one way to put it, especially if one cares to adopt the mindset of the late US Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin), whose Golden Fleece Awards for wasteful government spending went disproportionately to scientific research and technological development projects. But what's actually going up on the site of an old sugar mill in Pacora is a stronghold in the biological war against a serious insect pest, Cochliomyia hominivorax, a little blue-green fly whose larvae bore into the living flesh of warm-blooded creatures, including human beings. These larvae, better known as screw worms, can eat their way into the brain or another vital organ and become a direct cause of death. More frequently, however, the big holes they eat in the flesh of their victims become gateways to opportunistic infections. It used to be that Panamanian cattle ranchers would suffer about $9 million per year in losses caused by the screw worm. As long-time isthmian dog, cat and horse lovers will know, it wasn't just a cattle disease. Now, except for the occasional case in the Darien, the screw worm fly is history in Panama. That's because an international program largely funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has waged biological war against the insect, starting in the southern United States, crossing the border into Mexico and working south until it hit the Darien Gap. The project was carried into Panama by way of a 1994 agreement betweent the USDA and this country's Ministry of Agricultural Development (MIDA), which created the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Screw Worm, or COPEG according to its Spanish acronym. A screw worm fly breeds but once in a lifetime, and if the chosen mate turns out to be sterile, that's the end of the lineage. It has been found that screw worm flies are readily sterilized by the use of controlled radiation, and that potential mates can't tell the difference. Thus the release from airplanes of masses of sterile screw worm flies into an infested environment will cause most of the fertile flies to pick the wrong mate and die without issue. If the releases are on a big enough scale, persistent enough and so thorough as to not leave any pockets of unchecked fertility, screw worms will go extinct in an area. However, if the releases are discontinued the flies may come back from untreated adjacent areas, which is why the USDA determined that it would be better to drive the screw worms as far away from the US border as possible rather than to continue battling against the pests' re-establishment on American soil. Panama has been, with a few isolated cases in the Darien, free of screw worms for a few years now, but the sterile fly releases continue and the plant that's under construction is for a control effort that's expected to last for many years to come. The facility could also be pressed into service for similar biological control efforts against other agricultural pests, such as the Mediterranean fruit fly, by adding new modules that would take about six months to install. This will be Panama's largest and most sophisticated biological containment facility, a building within a building that's designed to keep fertile flies from escaping into the environment. The facility will also have an agricultural health lab. A couple of factors somewhat tangential to the plant's mission may also have profound effects on the Panamanian economy and way of life. The facility is to be equipped with a modern tertiary waste treatment plant and its own water purification facilities, and these may be copied for applications in other settings. The construction techniques used to build the plant --- the "tilt-up" method of building reinforced concrete wall panels horizontally on the ground and then lifting them into place with cranes --- are new to this country but so much cheaper and quicker than the old techniques that they are likely to catch on quickly in the Panamanian construction industry.
When the plant is open and operating at full capacity, about 250 permanent jobs will be created. Right now the project has employed a lot of temporary construction workers. Under the agreement that created COPEG, the United States government is footing 90 percent of the bill for the $40 million plant. Photos by Eric Jackson
Also in this section: News | Business | Editorial | Opinion | Letters | Arts | Review | Community | Fun | Travel Unclassified Ads | Calendar | Outdoors | Dining | Science | Sports | Español | Front Page Archives
Make the
Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com Find the boat of your dreams through Evermarine --- http://www.evermarine.com |
|||||||||||
|
