Preventing flies with flies.
The US authorities shall be opening a fly manufacturing unit in Texas to mass produce thousands and thousands of infertile flies as a part of a sterilization marketing campaign geared toward eliminating a flesh-eating parasite with a penchant for beef.
The $8.5 million breeding facility, simply 20 miles from the US-Mexico border, will deal with the New World screwworm flies wreaking havoc in Mexico after an outbreak final yr, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins introduced Wednesday.
The manufacturing unit will propagate thousands and thousands of sterile male screwworm flies to be launched into the wild. The male flies will hunt down fertile females and assist forestall them from laying eggs, which they often deposit in cows’ open wounds.
When left to fester, flesh-eating larvae burst from the eggs and might decimate complete herds of cows.
Whereas the flesh-eating parasites are treatable, they’ll unfold to nearly any mammal, together with family pets and, in some circumstances, people.
The Texas facility will mark the second of its variety on the Western Hemisphere. Up till now, Panama held the only manufacturing unit that helped forestall the screwworm flies from migrating north till final yr.
Two extra fly breeding services are on the horizon, too.
The Division of Agriculture additionally plans to spend $21 million to transform a separate facility that breeds fruit flies close to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala right into a screwworm fly manufacturing unit that received’t be full till the tip of 2026.
The USDA added that it’s contemplating setting up a companion breeding middle close to the Texas one that may produce as much as 300 million flies per week.
The US tackled a previous screwworm fly difficulty in the course of the twentieth century via the identical technique and finally eradicated the gnarly pests from the nation within the Nineteen Sixties.
Earlier than that, screwworms have been a persistent difficulty for cattle farmers within the Southeast.
“The United States has defeated [the New World screwworm] before, and we will do it again,” Rollins assured at a information convention Wednesday.
Mexican Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué celebrated the multi-nation collaboration in a put up on X and known as Rollins’ plan “a positive step in different aspects” that “will strengthen the joint Mexico-US work.”
“We trust the enthusiasm for cooperation that Secretary Rollins mentioned, and based on objective results and the reports from the USDA mission visiting us this week, we will be able to restart exports of our cattle as soon as possible,” he wrote.
The USDA warned that the flies have been detected simply 700 miles away from the US border. Some agriculture and cattle trade officers within the US fear that the swarms may very well be on the border by the tip of the summer time — proper when calving season begins.
With Publish wires
