AUSTIN, Texas – Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to address the reemergence of a flesh-eating parasite, called New World Screwworm, during a Friday morning news conference.
Abbott is expected to be joined by Texas State Veterinarian Bud Dinges, Wildlife Department Executive Director David Yoskowitz, and Rear Admiral Michael Schmoyer, a member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s response team.
KSAT plans to livestream the news conference at approximately 11 a.m. in this article. Delays are possible. If there is not a livestream available, please check back at a later time.
The news conference comes two days after the USDA confirmed a case of screwworm. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the case was found in a 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, which is located approximately 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Mexico border.
Dinges said he has established a 12-mile (20-kilometer) quarantine zone, prohibiting the movement of any warm-blooded animal — including pets — outside that zone without an inspection.
The fly was an annual warm-weather scourge of cattle ranchers from at least the 1930s through the 1960s, until the U.S. eradicated the pest by breeding sterile male flies and dropping swarms of them from planes to mate with wild females.
Screwworms were declared eradicated in the United States in 1966, though there were still outbreaks into the 1970s.
The deadly flies were detected in Mexico late in 2024, after years of containment at the southern end of Panama.
Rollins, U.S. and Texas agriculture officials, along with cattle industry leaders, have been sounding public alarms about the fly’s movement across Mexico for more than a year, spurred on by memories of it causing tens of millions of dollars of losses — potentially billions in today’s dollars — before its eradication.
Screwworm flies lay eggs in the wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals — including livestock, wild animals, pets, occasionally birds, and in rare cases, humans.
After they hatch, the larvae burrow into their hosts as they eat their flesh. As more maggots are born, the wounds become larger. The parasites can cause serious, often deadly damage to their hosts if they aren’t treated.
The USDA has been dropping sterile flies in South Texas since February, when it opened a center for dispersing them. It is now dropping them twice a week, for a total of 4 million flies. It’s also putting 4 million more a week in the ground as pupae, flies in the stage between larvae and adult, Schmoyer said.
Rollins said there have been no other detections of the fly in the U.S., and officials were quick to say that while the fly’s larvae are a threat to livestock production, they don’t infest food.
If properly treated, the infested calf should recover, Rollins said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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