\u201cFrom a food safety standpoint, no one needs to worry,\u201d VanHoy says. \u201cFood in the U.S. from livestock is extensively inspected, and there will not be an instance where maggots are going to be in your meat. What may change is the cost of our meat, just because of the increased effort, treatment, and surveillance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In addition to releasing sterile flies across Central America and Mexico to curb the spread, the USDA told\u00a0National Geographic\u00a0they\u2019ve released\u00a0131 million sterile male screwworms into Texas in preparation for an outbreak since early 2026, and they\u2019re not done yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cMillions of flies is a large number; we still want millions more,\u201d says Rear Admiral Michael Schmoyer<\/a>, the director of the USDA\u2019s New World Screwworm Directorate. It\u2019s the same method that initially eradicated the species from the U.S., ended the subsequent smaller outbreaks, and held the population at the Panamanian border for so many years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe females only mate one time, so we’re playing a numbers game, releasing millions of sterile males, just hoping you know we have enough to dilute out the natural population,\u201d VanHoy explains. \u201cI think that we should not panic. There’s a lot of really strong programs in place, and we know that we’ve battled this successfully before. We have history on our side.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, the Panamanian facility known as\u00a0COPEG<\/a>\u00a0produces all the sterile flies used to curtail outbreaks, but new facilities, including one in\u00a0Mexico<\/a>\u00a0and one in\u00a0Texas<\/a>, could eventually increase the production of sterile flies.\u00a0<\/p>\n How are screwworm cases treated?<\/p>\n \u201cThis is easily detectable. It is easily treatable,\u201d says Schmoyer.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cCase in point, the first case in the United States, I received pictures of that particular calf yesterday. It’s doing great, so it’s a great success story. The faster people can tell us things, the faster we can treat this one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cFrom a food safety standpoint, no one needs to worry,\u201d VanHoy says. \u201cFood in the U.S. from livestock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[115357,60339,118703,118702,117413,118704,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-332058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-screwworm","tag-screwworm-fly","tag-screwworm-in-cattle","tag-screwworm-in-humans","tag-screwworm-outbreak","tag-screwworm-treatment","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}