USDA confirmed the detection yesterday of a New World screwworm in a three-week old beef calf in Zavala County, Texas, about 60 miles from the Mexico border, and today officials laid out plans to keep it from spreading.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins updated the House Agriculture Committee Thursday morning. “It is a vexing challenge that we thought we had beaten in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, that was wrong as the screwworm began to make its way back towards us in 2021. The way we defeated it before, you need about 400 million sterile flies per week to actually mate with the bad flies, sterilize them….Because over years, we had taken, we as a country, we as a hemisphere, had taken our eye off the ball thinking it was eradicated. We got down to only 100 million sterile flies in production a week in a facility in Panama.”
Rollins says the administration has fast-tracked a facility being built right now in Mission, Texas. “That facility will come online next year. When it does, it’ll produce about 300 million flies per week in addition to the 100 million from Panama. And then we outfitted an additional Mexican facility in Matapa for another 100 million,” said Rollins.
Sec. Rollins at House Ag hearing 3:07
In the meantime, Rollins says they will be focused on trapping, surveillance, and treatment. She participated in a press call with USDA and state officials on immediate actions being taken.
“We have a unified incident command team with the Texas Animal Health Commission and have deployed APHIS as of yesterday immediately down to the area. We’ve established a 20 kilometer control area, a zone around the detection and implement quarantines, movement controls and surveillance in this area. We’ve expedited the targeted release of millions of sterile new world screw worm flies by immediately deploying 4 million as of yesterday, ground release chambers in the area in addition to the 4 million sterile flies per week already being released aerially in the area,” said Rollins.
She was joined Dudley Hoskins, Under Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs; and APHIS Associate Administrator/NWS Directorate Rear Admiral Michael Schmoyer; as well as Dr. Bud Dinges, Texas Animal Health Commission Executive Director. Listen to their comments below.
USDA NWS press update 21:49