James' World 2

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Just two months after reports warily noted that new world screwworms, flesh-eating parasites that are notorious for killing livestock, pets, and other animals, hadn’t “made it back into the U.S. yet,” they have—in the form of the country’s first human infection from the current outbreak in Central America. Screwworm larvae hitched a ride inside a person who had recently been to El Salvador, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The patient, a resident of Maryland, has been treated, and the threat to other people is low. “A human coming back with [larvae] is generally not going to lead to an outbreak because those humans are going to go get treated,” says veterinary entomologist Sonja L. Swiger of Texas A&M University. “These larvae are horrible. They eat your body, literally.”

The real danger is to livestock. The new world screwworm has been spreading steadily northward from Central America, mainly by traveling in infected animals, and poses a major threat to the U.S. meat industry. Last week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., determined that the advancing parasite signaled a “significant potential for a public health emergency” that could threaten national security, according to an HHS notice.

What is a screwworm?

Screwworms are the larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax, which lays up to 300 of them at a time inside open wounds or tender parts, such as the mouth, of warm-blooded animals. Once they hatch, the larvae corkscrew their way through living flesh as they consume it, causing extreme pain or, if left untreated, even death. After three to seven days, the larvae fall to the ground and burrow into the soil to pupate, transforming into flies. A female fly mates only once and carries around the sperm to lay about 3,000 eggs in her lifespan of up to 30 days.

How are screwworm infestations treated?

The best treatment is avoidance. Because the flies are attracted to open wounds—even something tiny such as a tick bite, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—people should cover all wounds, especially when sleeping outdoors, working near cattle or traveling in infected areas. Although the adult flies aren’t known to be in the U.S. yet, they are in southern Mexico.

If you suspect you have been attacked or infected, see a physician right away. The worms may be visible in the wounds. Each individual organism must be carefully extracted, which may require surgery. Currently, there are no drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating screwworm infestations.

Kennedy did declare, however, that the FDA can fast-track approval processes for antiparasitic drugs to be used in animals with screwworm infestations. (No cases from the current outbreak have been detected in animals in the U.S.) The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine is now working with makers of animal drugs to identify promising medications. Veterinarians may also use drugs that are approved for other uses to treat screwworm infestations.

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Sight words, writing his full name, addition, and subtraction — there’s a lot I know my 4-year-old son, Cooper, will learn at school this year. And because he truly loves to learn, I know he’ll nail it all. When he decided he wanted to write his numbers, we spent hours over one weekend practicing until he could scribble every digit almost as neatly as my own. When the kindergartners in his class of 3- to 5-year-olds began learning to read, he asked me for nights on end to teach him, too. I have no doubt he’ll gobble up every lesson his teacher gives him this year. But it’s not his academics I’m most excited for him to master.

You see, my little guy is exactly like me when I was his age: introverted, terrified of conflict, and at times cripplingly risk-averse. I’ve been prone to anxiety my entire life, afraid to put my face underwater when learning to swim or to ever take my training wheels off. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned to stand up for myself, and if we’re being honest, it still takes a major slight to prompt it. I see all of that same hesitation in my son. As the person who never learned to ride a bike or swim underwater, the grown woman who still feels a burning unease inside while struggling to speak up, I want to do everything in my power to change his trajectory.

Cooper has always been shy, and he isn’t one to stand up for himself or say anything to another kid who wrongs him (in the way little kids can “wrong” one another — snatching a toy, wiping a booger on his arm, you know). We’ve always told him the same thing: “Use your words and tell them no. If they don’t listen, ask your teacher for help.” For years, my husband and I have repeated the same refrain, until his first year in Montessori school.

In true toddler fashion, he wasn’t a fan of trying new foods, so I was elated when Cooper asked to eat lunch from the cafeteria on Fridays when they serve chicken nuggets or pizza. Then one day, on the drive home from school, I asked how his lunch was… and somebody had stolen his chicken nuggets. So, I messaged his teacher to let her know, and she assured me she knew the likely culprit and would sit that student with the kindergarten girls who she knew would give him hell.

Then she shared her insights: Cooper hadn’t said a word to anyone about it. It rang true for me that not only did my little shy guy not feel confident standing up for himself, but he also wasn’t sure how to ask for help, or when it was warranted. Maybe this is just being 3 or 4, but I’d seen all our friends’ children be ready and willing to speak up, bicker, and even throw hands if necessary. I imagine he feels a lot like I did in the face of conflict: dwarfed, intimidated, and just wanting it to end more than wanting it to be made right.

His teacher assured me it was fine for him to bring any conflicts to her until he got older and a little more confident, and said we should instruct him to do just that. And there I had it — something really life-changing his teacher could help me get across to him that my husband and I just haven’t been able to communicate the right way yet.

I had seen all the fruits of her labor throughout the school year: the easy way our son began counting to 200 by ones, fives, and tens, the songs about friendship he’d sing to himself as he played, and the confidence to get up on stage and perform a traditional Mexican hat dance with his classmates for the school’s heritage night (yes, it was precious). It hadn’t yet occurred to me that his teacher was also willing to coach him through some equally important life lessons, like how to work out a conflict with his classmates, speak up, or ask for help.

We’re lucky that at our son’s Montessori school, they have the same teacher from ages 3 to 5. His teacher, already well-versed in his strengths and hurdles, has two more years with him. He grew so much in his first year, and I could never have imagined how much he would learn. I know that when he walks out of his second year in her classroom, he’ll be unrecognizable in more new and wonderful ways. Maybe he’ll have neater handwriting, color entirely inside the lines, or even be starting to read. But honestly, my biggest hope is that he’ll know it’s OK to ask for help, say no, and talk to his friends about hard things. Knowing we’ll get to watch the slow bloom of his confidence, to me, is just as much a part of the magic of a new school year.

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Navigating friendships, asking for help, not knowing what you’re getting for lunch and eating it anyway… this stuff matters, too. by Katie McPherson  Aug. 4, 2025

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Two Israeli strikes hit a hospital in southern Gaza on Monday, killing five Palestinian journalists and at least 15 other people, according to local health officials.CreditCredit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief: that the brain’s map of the body reorganizes itself to compensate for missing body parts.

Previous research had suggested that neurons in the brain region holding this internal map, called the primary somatosensory cortex, would grow into the neighbouring area of the cortex that previously sensed the limb.

But the latest findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 21 August, reveal that the primary somatosensory cortex stays remarkably constant even years after arm amputation. The study refutes foundational knowledge in the field of neuroscience that losing a limb results in a drastic reorganization of this region, the authors say.

“Pretty much every neuroscientist has learnt through their textbook that the brain has the capacity for reorganization, and this is demonstrated through studies on amputees,” says study senior author Tamar Makin, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But “textbooks can be wrong”, she adds. “We shouldn’t take anything for granted, especially when it comes to brain research.”

The discovery could lead to the development of better prosthetic devices, or improved treatments for pain in ‘phantom limbs’ — when people continue to sense the amputated limb. It could also help scientists working to restore sensation in people who have had amputations.

Mapping cortical plasticity

Study first author Hunter Schone, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, says that previous reports from some people with amputations had led him and his colleagues to doubt the idea that the brain’s map of the body is reorganized after amputation. These maps are responsible for processing sensory information, such as touch or temperature, at specific body regions. “They would say: ‘I can still feel the limb, I can still move individual fingers of a hand I haven’t had for decades,’” Schone says.

To investigate this contradiction, the researchers followed three people who were due to undergo amputation of one of their arms. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the cortical representations of the body before the surgery, and then after the amputation for up to five years. It is the first study to do this.

Before their amputations, participants performed various movements, such as tapping their fingers, pursing their lips, and flexing their toes while inside an fMRI scanner that measured the activity in different parts of the brain. This allowed the researchers to create a cortical ‘map’ showing which regions sensed the hand. To test the idea that neighbouring neurons redistribute in the cortex after amputation, they also made maps of the adjacent cortical area — in this case, the part that processes sensations from the lips. The participants repeated this exercise several times after their amputation, tapping “with their phantom fingers”, says Schone.

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