If life wasn’t already hard enough for cattle farmers trying to bring their herd sizes back up after some rough years with fire and other setbacks, they’ve now got to deal with a flesh-eating fly endangering their herds.
As of this week, we now have the first known case of the New World Screw worm fly crossing back into Texas after having previously been eradicated in America and Mexico. A massive cooperative effort between Mexico and the Americans had eradicated the screw worm sixty years ago using a process that include releasing sterile flies into the wild. Since they only mate once, it was an effective way of wiping out their breeding cycle.
With the Screw Worm fly eradicated for so many years, you would expect that getting that program back up to speed might take some time.
For farmers in Texas, that time just ran out.
A case of New World screwworm has been confirmed in South Texas, the US Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday night. It marks the first detected breach of the US-Mexico border by the ravenous flesh-eating flies, which have been making their way up through Central America for the past several years.
In a social media post Wednesday afternoon, the USDA revealed that a sample from Texas had been sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, lowa for confirmatory testing of a screwworm infection. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins later posted that the testing had confirmed the infection, which was found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas.
Chatter of a screwworm detection had already been building this week, rattling the US cattle industry.
Although many animals, including humans, can be victims of the parasite, the screwworm is especially dangerous to livestock. Female screwworms lay hundreds of eggs in the wounds and openings of warm-blooded creatures, allowing their larvae to feast on the living animals, causing deep, festering, life-threatening wounds. Although the screwworm was once endemic to the US, it was eradicated amid a yearslong control effort in the 1960s. The USDA estimates that keeping screwworms out of the US has saved the livestock industry $900 million each year. — Ars Technica
The same article goes on to mention that there is still dispute on whether the fly has arrived in the US. But either way, the screw worm fly has been spreading northward. Even Newsweek points the finger at the Darien Gap.
For decades, the United States and Panama maintained a binational barrier to block the parasite at the Darién, using a program that dropped millions of sterilized screwworm flies over the jungle to prevent breeding. That system began unraveling in 2022, amid pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions and record human and animal movement through the region.
Between 2021 and 2024, more than 1.2 million migrants crossed the Darién, according to data from Panama’s National Migration Service and UNHCR. The crossings peaked at 520,000 in 2023 before falling to 302,000 in 2024. U.S. officials believe that mass movement contributed to operational breakdowns in the region’s screwworm control infrastructure. — NewsWeek, July 2025
Thanks to mass migration, that flesh eating fly came North with the illegal aliens, with predictably devastating environmental effects normally associated with a dangerous invasive species.
Next time your leftist buddy tries to tell you Dems are ‘green’… remind him of that fun fact.
And if they complain about the cost of meat? Well… if this spreads, that’s going to be just one more point of upward pressure on grocery prices.
When they try to pin that on the GOP… remind them of the direct role Biden’s open border, and his hapless Border Czar played in making it happen.
