By John Hanna
The New World screwworm fly has reached south Texas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed Wednesday, the first time in decades that the parasite with flesh-eating larvae has threatened the nation's cattle industry and only the third time it's appeared in the U.S. in that time.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the case was in a 3-week-old calf in LaPryor, Texas, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Mexico border. Texas State Veterinarian Bud Dinges said he has established a 12-mile (20-kilometer) quarantine zone, prohibiting the movement of any warm-blooded animal—including pets—outside that zone without an inspection.
Rollins said there have been no other detections of the fly in the U.S., and officials were quick to say that while the fly's larvae are a threat to livestock production, they don't infest food. Properly treated, even the infested calf should recover, Rollins said.
Rollins, U.S. and Texas agriculture officials, and cattle industry leaders have been sounding public alarms about the fly's movement across Mexico for more than a year, spurred on by memories of it causing tens of millions of dollars of losses—potentially billions in today's dollars—before its eradication in the 1970s.
It is the first case confirmed in Texas since 1966, Rollins said.
The months of effort to keep the fly out of the U.S. have included dropping millions of sterile screwworm flies in the area to mate with wild females—the same method used successfully before the fly was eradicated. Rollins said the USDA is confident enough in its preparations that it believes "there is no threat of mass infestation."
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