The United States has now recorded 56 cases of New World screwworm, a flesh-eating fly larva, after two new detections in Grant County, New Mexico, last week, in a horse and a calf, Beef Central reports, citing the local broadcaster KOAT 7 News. Five cases are active, three in Texas and two in New Mexico.
The pest has been moving north through Texas and New Mexico since June, when an infected calf was found near the Mexican border in Texas, and has since been found in horses, cattle, dogs, goats and sheep. State and federal officials are expanding surveillance and fly trapping, and have set up two infested zones around the latest location where animals must be inspected and treated.
The new cases follow the reopening at the end of September of the Santa Teresa crossing, which carries Mexican feeder cattle into US feedlots and had been closed for nearly two years after screwworm was found in Mexico; it used to pass 3,000 to 3,500 head a day. Mexico has recorded 47,425 cases since 2024, and Australian analyst Simon Quilty of Global Agri-trends told northern producers that Mexico supplies about 5% of US production as feeder steers, likely to be no more than 2% of US slaughter in 2027.
Past US outbreaks have been beaten by releasing sterile male flies, as in the Florida Keys in 2016, which took about a year. More than 1.4 billion sterile flies have been released since the first Texas case in June, according to The Texan, and the US is building a sterile fly plant in Texas and doubling capacity at a renovated facility in Metapa, Mexico.
In Metapa, residents protested last week, according to Reuters, demanding the plant be moved from the town centre because its smell, likened to rotting meat, causes nausea and has drifted into schools. The report is by Lydia Burton for Beef Central.
Photo: Scott Bauer, USDA (entomologist Edward F. Knipling, who devised the sterile insect technique) / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Beef Central
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