State Rep. Don McLaughlin of Uvalde released a statement on June 1 claiming that parasitic screwworms had almost breached the Texas-Mexico border.
“This is not true,” a post on the USDA’s X account responded.
On June 3, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins confirmed that a sample taken from a three-week-old calf in Zavala County contained the damaging maggots.
Now, after a slow federal response and an ineffective one from state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, authorities are scrambling to prevent the pest from penetrating deeply into Texas and harming its $15 billion cattle industry. We needed serious, well-informed public servants who moved swiftly last year to prevent the parasite from reaching Texas. What we have are a social media cowboy and an ideologue — and screwworms.
The New World screwworm is a nasty creature. Female screwworm flies lay their eggs in openings in the skin, such as cuts or scrapes, or in the eyes, ears or mouth. The eggs hatch into larvae that burrow into living flesh to feed.
Screwworms inflict the most economic damage on the cattle industry, but any warm-blooded animal, from goats to deer to dogs to humans, can provide a good meal for them. In October 1972, this newspaper reported that screwworms were detected on six children in San Antonio, along with some household pets and animals at the city zoo.
The pest has been a problem in Texas for decades. In 1935, Texas tallied 3,245,297 cases of screwworms. The most reliable tactics for protecting herds were watching livestock closely and cleaning and treating any infested wounds with benzol, an impure form of the chemical benzene. The wounds would then be covered with clean cotton plugs soaked in pine tar.
Entomologists later devised a way to wipe out the pest altogether: grow huge numbers of flies in a lab, sterilize them, then release them into the wild. The sterilized males would mate with females but their eggs wouldn’t be viable. Working with Mexico, the United States dispersed millions of sterile flies into infested areas on both sides of the border.
The strategy was so effective and valuable that Vice President Lyndon Johnson helped dedicate a new screwworm fly factory at Moore Air Force Base near Mission, Texas in 1962. That factory could produce 75,000,000 sterile flies each week. By 1964, this newspaper’s farm editor wrote that the top agriculture story of 1963 was “the eradication of Texas’ most ravaging livestock pest since the fever tick — the deadly screwworm.”
That announcement was, obviously, premature. It is hard to totally eradicate an insect that can feed on so many different animals and inhabit such a broad territory. But through long-term cooperation with Mexico and Panama, it had been controlled.
The U.S. opened a new fly dispersal facility in South Texas in February, and broke ground on a new sterile fly production facility in April, according to news releases. Agricultural officials are stepping up inspections, closing the border to livestock transport and urging awareness.
As an approach, that’s not too little, but it is a little late.
– Dallas Morning News
