Texas is prepared for the long-term fight against screwworms, Abbott and USDA chief say

EDINBURG — U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Gov. Greg Abbott said during a visit to the Rio Grande Valley on Monday that Texas and the U.S. have done everything possible to protect the nation’s multi-billion dollar cattle industry against the threat posed by the New World Screwworm. 

Screwworms, or flies that lay eggs in open wounds that hatch into flesh-eating maggots, were eradicated from the U.S. in the 1980s, but the pests have gradually been creeping northward through Central America and Mexico for the past few years — a trend Rollins attributed to human migration on Monday. 

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed a screwworm infestation in an imported horse in Florida, and infestations have been detected in Mexico within 70 miles of the U.S. border.

Rollins called Texas “ground zero” in America’s war against the pest — a war, she said, America is prepared to fight.

“So we have tools available today that we didn’t have in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s that I sincerely believe — if it does cross our border — we are ready,” Rollins said. “We know the enemy. We know how to manage it. We know how to solve for it. And we will do everything we can to protect our country.”

Some of those new tools, Rollins said, are cameras deployed in South Texas’ wilderness that can detect screwworm flies using artificial intelligence.

Others are more traditional, like fly traps.

Since June, more than 42,000 flies have been trapped and tested in Texas, Rollins said. None of them were screwworm flies.

The country’s main weapon in combatting screwworms will be the same one that allowed it to eradicate screwworms 40 years ago: sterile flies.

Female screwworms mate only once, so by breeding and releasing millions of sterile flies, the government can interrupt their lifecycle and collapse their population.

On Monday, Rollins and Abbott celebrated the opening of a sterile fly dispersal facility at Moore Air Field. The facility, near Mission, will allow the U.S. to release millions of sterile flies per week in South Texas and northern Mexico.

“This facility will be a critical part of our overall efforts to combat the new world screwworm,” Rollins said.

Read Part 1 of our new series: The worms are coming: Texas braces for a nightmare it once barely survived.

Abbott described the facility as a stopgap effort that’s part of a long-term solution.

That long-term solution is a $750 million sterile fly production facility at Moore Air Base that Rollins says should break ground in a month or two and be operational by the end of 2027.

Currently the only sterile fly production facility is in Panama.

Abbott said the threat screwworms pose to Texas and the United States’ economy justify a significant response.

“We’re doing this because of what we know it means to the beef industry here in the state of Texas,” he said.

The impact screwworms could have on the cattle industry, Abbott said, could reverberate through the restaurant and grocery industry, and ultimately hit the wallet of anybody who buys food to put on their table.

There may not be any wild screwworm flies in the U.S., but the new dispersal facility means South Texas will soon be teeming with lab-grown sterile screwworm flies.

Last week, USDA reallocated aircraft and sterile flies to deploy them in a new dispersal area that plunges 50 miles into Texas.

On Monday, Moore Field staff demonstrated part of that process while attendees snacked on a sheetcake emblazoned with a picture of a screwworm fly.

The facility receives screwworm pupa — hard little pellets — from the Panama facility.

Those pupae are placed in a hopper with a fluorescent green dye that sticks to the bugs after they hatch. Once they hatch, the dye glows under UV light, letting animal health officials differentiate them from wild flies.

Those pupae are loaded into trays with sugar water and agar food for the flies, which hatch within days and can then be dropped via airplane.

Rear Admiral Michael Schmoyer, Associate Administrator for USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and New World Screwworm Directorate Director, described that dispersal effort as something of a protective shield.

“This is us being preemptive,” he said.