{"id":340981,"date":"2026-06-18T06:39:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T06:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/340981\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T06:39:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T06:39:19","slug":"history-of-screwworm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/340981\/","title":{"rendered":"History of screwworm"},"content":{"rendered":"

TEXAS \u2014 After decades of being eradicated in the United States, the New World screwworm (NWS)<\/a> has returned to Texas.<\/p>\n

According to a dashboard<\/a> from the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, there are at least 11 active cases in the United States: 10 in Texas and one in New Mexico.<\/p>\n

The first case<\/a> of NWS was confirmed on June 3.<\/p>\n

As officials monitor recent screwworm developments in the state, one University of Texas at Austin professor thought back to when the New World screwworm was the \u201ctalk of the town\u201d during his childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a memory of the late \u201840s and \u201850s,\u201d said Lawrence Gilbert. \u201cThat was a big drought in South Texas. I remember the screwworm issue was considered to be one of the big problems.”<\/p>\n

The NWS, however, has a long history before Gilbert\u2019s childhood. Gilbert said that even before it was first documented in 1858, it has always been a part of the ecosystem.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, we have humans here, and they\u2019re worried about it because of the economy, but this is a natural part of the system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Gilbert is the faculty director at UT\u2019s Brackenridge Field Laboratory<\/a>, where his team focuses on invasive species and their effects. There, they also identify natural predators that specifically target invasive species.<\/p>\n

Among the thousands of insects stored at the lab is the NWS, first documented<\/a> by French entomologist Charles Coquerel in 1858. According to Gilbert, identifying the NWS fly is a difficult task as opposed to identifying the pest in its larvae state.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d have to kind of be a specialist and put it under a [micro]scope and look at the structures,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Gilbert also touched on how the NWS was dealt with before modern methods were developed.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou had basically direct on-wound treatments of cattle,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the past, there was a lot of cheap that could do stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hands-on approach was recommended by the USDA in the 1920s.<\/p>\n

A 1920 film from the USDA<\/a> archival library shows how ranchers were advised to deal with NWS, including hand-applying medicine directly onto the wound of a living, affected animal, and burning the carcasses of infected dead animals.<\/p>\n

An accidental discovery by an Austin-based scientist paved the way for modern methods to take over, like Sterile Insect Technology (SIT).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a guy, Hermann Muller, [who] was recruited here from Columbia University, from a fruit fly genetics lab,\u201d Gilbert said. \u201cAnd he was playing around with X-rays, causing mutations. And then he discovered some of his X-rayed flies produced sterile males.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists from the USDA working on a solution to eradicate NWS in the 1940s through the 1950s communicated with Muller via letters to discuss applying Muller\u2019s X-ray method to NWS.<\/p>\n

In a March 10, 1950, letter to the USDA<\/a>, Muller\u2019s first sentence read in part, \u201cI think that your very ingenious idea for reducing and perhaps eventually eliminating the blow fly in the southern states might work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group of USDA scientists tested the theory, and the result was a batch of sterilized male flies \u2014 and thus Sterile Insect Technology (SIT)<\/a> was created. A 1960 film<\/a> from the U.S. Department of Energy shows the process of scientists testing the theory.<\/p>\n

The first country to use SIT<\/a> was Curacao, effectively eradicating NWS in the country by 1954. The United States followed, using SIT in the \u201850s and \u201860s and completely eradicating NWS by 1982. Other countries have also used SIT and found success.<\/p>\n

Today, with the return of the NWS, officials heavily rely on SIT to mitigate the issue. Gov. Greg Abbott on June 5 called for a rapid response of SIT teams to control the NWS and even called for a new SIT facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cI authorize the use of all available resources of state government to respond to this disaster and reassign all resources from across the state as needed to address the NWS,\u201d Abbott said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlong those lines,\u201d he continued, \u201cI\u2019m making available any and all of our state personnel, including our university systems, to accelerate the movement of sterile flies into the state of Texas, and to accelerate the construction of the new sterile screwworm facility in Edinburgh.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEXAS \u2014 After decades of being eradicated in the United States, the New World screwworm (NWS) has returned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[12926,2160,132,134,133,1570,102,138,223,82,27,1569,2053,835],"class_list":["post-340981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-andres-rendon","tag-app-top-stories","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-ctv","tag-dallas","tag-el-paso","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-texas","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340981","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=340981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}