Medfly: Among Your Souvenirs ~ 1960 USDA Agricultural Research Service (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Portrays the menace foreign plant and animal pests present to U S Agriculture and Public Health. Shows how tourists unwittingly bring serious foreign pests into the United States in innocent looking items. Depicts Inspections carried on to stop these invasions.'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratitis_capitata

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Ceratitis capitata, commonly known as the Mediterranean fruit fly or medfly, is a yellow and brown fruit pest that originates from sub-Saharan Africa. C. capitata has no near relatives in the Western Hemisphere and is considered to be one of the most destructive fruit pests in the world. There have been occasional medfly infestations in the states of California, Florida, and Texas that required extensive eradication efforts to prevent the fly from establishing itself in the US.

C. capitata is the most economically important fruit fly species because of its ability to survive in cooler climates more successfully than most other fly species, and its ability to inhabit over 200+ tropical fruits and vegetables to which it causes severe destruction and degradation. The practices used to eradicate the medfly after its introduction into a new environment can be extremely difficult and expensive, but infestation of C. capitata will induce lower crop yields and costly sorting processes for fresh fruits and vegetables...

C. capitata is present throughout Africa, South and Central America, the Middle East, and Southern Europe. It has been confirmed to be absent in much of North America, the Indian subcontinent, some parts of South America, and most of Australia...

In 1981, California Governor Jerry Brown, who had established a reputation as a strong environmentalist, was confronted with a serious medfly infestation in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was advised by the state's agricultural industry and the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection service (APHIS) to authorize airborne spraying of the region. Initially, in accordance with his environmental protection stance, he chose to authorize ground-level spraying only. Unfortunately, the infestation spread as the medfly reproductive cycle outpaced the spraying. After more than a month, millions of dollars of crops had been destroyed and billions of dollars more were threatened. Governor Brown then authorized a massive response to the infestation. Fleets of helicopters sprayed malathion at night, and the California National Guard set up highway checkpoints and collected many tons of local fruit. In the final stage of the campaign, entomologists released millions of sterile male medflies in an attempt to disrupt the insects' reproductive cycle.

Ultimately, the infestation was eradicated, but both the governor's delay and the scale of the action has remained controversial ever since. Some people claimed that malathion was toxic to humans, animals, as well as insects. In response to such concerns, Brown's chief of staff, B. T. Collins, staged a news conference during which he publicly drank a small glass of malathion. Many people complained that, while the malathion may not have been very toxic to humans, the aerosol spray containing it was corrosive to car paint.

During the week of September 9, 2007, adult flies and their larvae were found in Dixon, California. The California Department of Food and Agriculture and cooperating county and federal agricultural officials started eradication and quarantine efforts in the area. Eradication was declared on August 8, 2008, when no "wild" (i.e. non-sterile) medflies were detected for three generations.

On November 14, 2008, four adult flies were found in El Cajon, California. The San Diego County Agricultural Commission implemented a treatment plan, including distributing millions of sterile male flies, local produce quarantines, and ground spraying with organic pesticides...