The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to open a new facility in South Texas to defend against New World Screwworms: a destructive pest once eradicated from the U.S. but on its way back.
Screwworms – which are actually flies – used to be a huge problem for ranchers. They lay their eggs in the open wounds of mammals, and their flesh-eating larvae can cause disease and even death. Entomologists pushed them out of the U.S. in the 1960s, but now they are advancing through Mexico toward the southern border.
On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that her department would open a new facility to fight screwworms at Moore Air Base, an inactive Air Force property in Hidalgo County near the southern border.
Researchers first eradicated the insect from the U.S. by dropping sterilized screwworms from airplanes. The Moore Air Base facility, which will cost $8.5 million to construct, will be a staging area to use the same technique in northern Mexico, keeping them from reaching the U.S. border. Rollins, a Texan, said it was just one of the investments her department was making to fight screwworms.
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“We are exploring all options to eradicate the screwworm, including potential expenditures in new technologies, new science, and plans to move forward with the design process of a domestic production facility,” Rollins said.
The production facility to make more sterilized flies would also be housed at Moore Air Base, but Rollins said it would take at least two to three years and several hundred million dollars to build.
Currently the only facility in the world that makes sterilized screwworms is in Panama, although the USDA recently spent $21 million to set up another facility in Metapa, Mexico. More sterilized screwworms are needed in order to push them back south.
The agency is also working with researchers at universities in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to develop better technology to fight the flies.
