Texas veterinarian orders 12-mile quarantine as Screwworm Texas spreads
The New World screwworm fly has reached screwworm texas, and the Texas state veterinarian set a 12-mile quarantine zone to keep animals from leaving the area without inspection. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the pest, absent from Texas since 1966, now poses a direct threat to the state’s cattle industry.
USDA said on Monday that total reported cases rose to four. Two new cases were added then: a dog in Lea County, New Mexico, the first outside Texas, and a calf in La Salle County, Texas.
Texas cattle and screwworm Texas
The fly threatens the $113 billion U.S. cattle industry, and Texas alone is home to $17 billion worth of cattle. For ranchers, the immediate issue is movement control. Animals in the quarantine area now need an inspection before they can leave, creating a tighter check on transport out of south Texas.
Screwworm flies were once an annual warm-weather scourge for cattle ranchers from at least the 1930s through the 1960s. The United States drove them out by breeding sterile male flies and dropping them from planes to mate with wild females, a control method that had kept the pest out of Texas for decades.
Lea County and La Salle County
The new cases show the pest is no longer limited to one side of the state line. USDA identified the dog in Lea County and the calf in La Salle County as separate incidents, with one case reported just across the border from Texas and the other inside a major cattle county.
That leaves ranchers with a practical next step already in place: keep animals inside the quarantine zone from moving without inspection. The quarantine is the immediate barrier between the new detections and wider spread across south Texas.
