The Food and Drug Administration has authorized an over-the-counter generic tablet to treat New World screwworm in dogs and cats. Emergency authorization. Generic. Over-the-counter. For screwworm. I want to congratulate whatever bureaucrat typed those four words in sequence and still filed the paperwork without once laughing into the carbon copy.
Let us take the premise seriously, because it deserves that much. An emergency, in FDA terms, is a situation requiring action faster than the normal regulatory timeline allows. The normal regulatory timeline, you may recall, is the one that treats “time” as a suggestion and “urgency” as a foreign film it has not gotten around to watching. So when the FDA declares something an emergency, we are to understand that the regular process would have been even slower — which raises the interesting question of what was living inside your pet while the paperwork was in committee.
The parasite in question is called the New World screwworm, and I will not improve on that name. The New World screwworm is exactly what it sounds like if you accept the premise that the Old World had a screwworm and someone felt the franchise needed expanding. It is a fly whose larvae burrow into living tissue. The FDA, confronted with this information, convened its considerable institutional authority and authorized a tablet. Generic. You can buy it off the shelf. It took an emergency declaration to get there, but it got there, and we should all take a moment to appreciate that the most powerful food-and-drug regulatory body on earth needed emergency powers to approve the thing your pharmacist already stocks next to the flea collars.
The real achievement here is not the tablet — ivermectin-class compounds have been doing this kind of work for decades, the worm is not new to medicine, only to the shelf. The achievement is the category. “Emergency authorization for a generic over-the-counter drug” is the regulatory state describing, in one subordinate clause, both its finest hour and its normal Tuesday. The crisis is that without an emergency, the ordinary was unavailable. The solution to the emergency is the ordinary.
The screwworm, to its credit, did not require authorization to begin burrowing. It simply found the opening and got on with it. In that sense, the worm and the FDA have arrived at the same place by opposite routes — one by moving very fast, and one by moving very slowly, and both of them, in the end, inside the same animal.