Episode Summary
n this episode of WasteWise, Daniel Nelsen, Chief Commercial Officer at BioSAFE Engineering, breaks down the resurgence of New World screwworm — a fly-borne disease that has historically threatened the U.S. cattle industry but had been largely contained in Central America for decades. Daniel walks through how the disease spreads, why cattle agriculture is particularly vulnerable, and how a clever biological intervention known as the sterile insect technique kept outbreaks at bay for years.
The conversation then turns to the policy side of the story. Daniel explains how cuts to government monitoring and prevention programs created the conditions for the disease to move closer to U.S. borders, and what restoring funding for sterile fly production and observation programs could mean for returning to a containment steady state. He frames the outbreak as an unfortunate but instructive case study in what happens when prevention infrastructure is allowed to erode.
Finally, Daniel offers practical guidance for stakeholders navigating outbreak response — encouraging them to think beyond the letter of regulatory guidance and focus on its intent. His core message: when it comes to biosecurity and waste handling around infected animals, erring on the side of caution is almost always less expensive than the alternative.
BioSAFE Engineering
Daniel A. Nelsen
COO
BioSAFE Engineering
Daniel leads commercial strategy at BioSAFE Engineering, a U.S.-based manufacturer of on-site biomedical waste treatment, effluent decontamination, and tissue digestion systems used by life sciences labs, healthcare facilities, biopharmaceutical manufacturers, and waste processors worldwide. He hosts the WasteWise series, where he brings technical depth to topics at the intersection of biosafety, regulation, and waste management.
Key Insights
The sterile insect technique is a quiet biosecurity success story — until it isn't.
For decades, New World screwworm was contained in Central America through one of the most elegant disease control strategies in modern agriculture: breeding and releasing sterile flies that mate with wild populations, collapse the next generation, and drive disease vectors to local extinction. The same approach has been studied for mosquito control in subtropical regions of the U.S. The technique’s effectiveness, however, is only as good as the consistency of the program behind it. When funding and monitoring infrastructure stay intact, the disease never makes headlines — which is precisely why it’s so easy to underfund until an outbreak forces the conversation.
Cuts to monitoring and prevention programs have downstream consequences that aren't visible until they are.
Daniel points to government program reductions in the past year as a key factor in the current outbreak’s trajectory. Observation programs in Central America, sterile fly production capacity, and active monitoring all play roles in keeping a disease like screwworm bottled up far from U.S. cattle operations. When those programs are streamlined or cut, the system doesn’t fail immediately — but it does become more fragile. For executives in agriculture, biosafety, and public health, this is a reminder that prevention infrastructure is a long-tail investment, and the ROI shows up most clearly when it’s missing.
Prevention always has a cost — and that cost is almost always lower than the alternative.
One of Daniel’s most important framings is that risk reduction inevitably increases cost or operational complexity for affected stakeholders. That tension is why prevention programs are often the first to face budget scrutiny. But outbreaks function as case studies in the true cost of underinvestment: lost cattle, disrupted supply chains, emergency response funding, and reputational damage to entire industries. The strategic lesson for leaders is to evaluate prevention spending not against zero, but against the full cost of an outbreak scenario.
Episode Highlights
What New World screwworm is and why cattle are uniquely vulnerable
Daniel opens with a primer on the disease, explaining that it has historically been contained in Central America and that its primary commercial impact is on cattle raised for agriculture. The close-quarters nature of cattle operations — especially during certain stages of the breeding cycle — makes the disease particularly disruptive when it spreads. “It’s a disease whose primary impact is, or at least the impact we’re primarily concerned with, is its impact on cattle. Specifically cattle raised as part of agriculture and the closer nature of the way cattle are kept, particularly at different stages throughout the cow breeding cycle, it can be problematic for this disease and the spread of this disease.”
How the sterile insect technique created decades of containment
Daniel walks through the mechanics of the sterile insect technique — breeding sterile flies, releasing them into affected regions, and creating a population bottleneck as wild flies fail to reproduce. He notes the same approach has been discussed for mosquito control in Florida and other subtropical U.S. regions.
“They breed with wild disease-bearing populations, and then the offspring are sterile and unable to breed… and so that creates a population bottleneck in the disease vector, and the disease vectors die off after that effect.”
Why government program cuts are at the center of the current outbreak
Daniel connects the dots between recent reductions in federal funding for monitoring and sterile fly production and the conditions that allowed screwworm to reemerge as a threat. He’s measured in his framing but direct about the cause-and-effect relationship.
“A big piece of it was that in the government streamlining operations last year, a number of government programs were cut who were focused on… the observation and monitoring of diseases and these fly populations in Central America.”
The cost-of-prevention conversation that leaders need to have
Daniel acknowledges the tension at the heart of all biosecurity decisions: prevention costs money and adds operational complexity. But outbreaks reveal the true price of underinvestment, and he argues the current event should sharpen that conversation across the industry.
“Anytime you’re talking about prevention or risk reduction, you’re generally also talking about either increasing cost or increasing complexity of operations for the affected stakeholders… outbreaks like this do serve as a case study of what happens if prevention measures aren’t kept up.”
“It will be when a contract renewal is coming up and they’re going back through the budget for the previous year. It may be if they’re growing—adding new buildings or new sites—and looking at how they’re managing logistics across those sites, whether that’s something they want to manage themselves or handle through a third party.”
