HOUSTON – Texas Governor Greg Abbott has issued a statewide disaster declaration in order to better equip state agencies to prevent the potential spread of the New World Screwworm fly into Texas and to better protect livestock and wildlife.
The fly has spread into Mexico and state agencies are working to ensure it does not spread any further into Texas.
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“Although the New World screwworm fly is not yet present in Texas or the U.S., its northward spread from Mexico toward the U.S. southern border poses a serious threat to Texas’ livestock industry and wildlife,” said Governor Abbott. “State law authorizes me to act to prevent a threat of infestation that could cause severe damage to Texas property, and I will not wait for such harm to reach our livestock and wildlife. With this statewide disaster declaration, the Texas NWS Response Team can fully utilize all state government prevention and response resources to prevent the re-emergence of this destructive parasite. Texas is prepared to fully eradicate this pest if need be.”
What is the New World Screwworm?
The New World Screwworm fly is a fly native to South America and the Caribbean. Its historical range includes regions of Central America and up into the southern United States, although it was officially declared eradicated in the United States in 1966. Smaller , localized outbreaks have occurred, including one in Texas in 1975-1976.
The fly spreads when a female fly lays its eggs on open wounds or on other parts of the body in warm-blooded animals. This can lead to a condition called Myiasis, which is a parasitic infestation of larvae (maggots) on tissue.
“They actually eat live flesh, its like right out of a horror movie, its not pleasant I promise you, bad odor, bad visual, there’s nothing about it pretty,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
Although Myiasis primarily affects livestock, people can also be affected.
Miller says he believes a lot of the spread has been hitchhiking insects either on transported infected livestock as well as on vehicles.
“We have surveillance fly traps all up and down the Mexican border and I’ve put them around the cruise ship terminals in Galveston and Corpus Christi in case there’s some of those hitchhikers, those cruise ship actually go down into parts of Mexico where the fly is most active,” he said.
The economic and environmental threat
Miller says should the screwworm spread to Texas, the environmental and economic cost could be disastrous.
“Just the speculation or rumor that Texas now has screwworms crashes the livestock futures market, I mean it just goes off the board, its so volatile, just the talk of it can crash livestock markets, we have a $30 billion livestock industry that would certainly be affected there, we might end up with quarantines where we couldn’t ship cattle in certain areas if it was a real bad outbreak,” he said.
Not only could it affect livestock and wildlife, it could also affect pets and people should the flies make it to Texas.
How Texas is responding
Commissioner Miller explained why Governor Abbott has issued a disaster declaration despite the fly not being detected in the state at this time.
“It’s pre-emptive basically, it allows agencies like mine, the Texas Department of Agriculture, Animal Health Department, Parks and Wildlife, Division of Emergency Management, it gives us the ready tools to act quickly and responsively in case we do get it,” Miller said.
He says this declaration would allow the state to get assets from federal partners, such as funding and access to sterile flies which are used to help stop the spread of the insects. The flies mate with the female flies and because the flies only mate once in a lifetime and the males are sterile, the eggs are infertile and do not hatch.
Miller says one of the concerning aspects of the situation right now is the flies are still spreading to the south even in winter.
“Its within 187 miles of our border in the middle of winter, that’s the troubling part, usually its dormant, you don’t have flies in the middle of winter but we do now, so if we have swarms of screwworm flies just across our border in the winter time, unfortunately I think we are probably going to have them because we just aren’t stopping them,” he said.
Miller said the state has released almost 5 billion sterile flies to help combat the screwworm, but new cases continue to pop up.
“We have this isolated case maybe a 50-square mile area just south of McAllen and we’ve probably released 500 million flies there and we still have new cases every week, so what we are doing is not working,” he said.
He said he recently met with the leaders of Mexico and 11 Central American countries and discussed research on fly bait that was made by USDA.
“In 1975 we have 29,000 cases, we released the bait and it wiped them out and we haven’t had them since, you can go to the hardware store and buy fly bait, I use it around my barn for barn flies, stable flies, but there’s not one made specifically for screwworm flies, If we could get that, I think we could arrest this problem and put it to bed,” he said.