Avian Flu Wiped Out Poultry. Now the Screwworm Is Coming for Beef.

The New York Times ^ | July 28, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET | Pooja Salhotra

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Avian Flu Wiped Out Poultry. Now the Screwworm Is Coming for Beef.

First came bird flu, which led to the culling of large swaths of the nation’s poultry flocks and the soaring egg prices that helped undermine President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s re-election. Now, ranchers in Texas and officials at the Agriculture Department are raising the next alarm: the New World screwworm.

Texas livestock producers and ranchers fear the United States is ill-equipped to handle a potential outbreak of screwworm, whose incursion into the country appears increasingly likely. With beef prices already soaring, the screwworm, whose Latin name roughly translates to “man-eater,” is a real threat, to both cows and the cost of living for America’s meat lovers.

“If we wait, we lose,” Stephen Diebel, vice president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, told state lawmakers during a hearing in Austin this week as he pleaded for intervention.

The screwworm, like the measles, may have been forgotten by many, but it’s not new. And like the measles, which has cropped up in Texas recently, screwworm was once all but eradicated from the United States.

Infestations occur when a female fly lays eggs, between 10 and 400 at a time, on a fresh animal wound. Within a few hours, the eggs hatch into larvae that burrow and feed on the flesh. As the wound worsens, it attracts more flies, which lay more eggs. After about a week, adult screwworm flies can reproduce and begin the cycle all over again. The parasitic infection can kill a cow within two weeks if left untreated. There is currently no approved treatment.

“It’s like something out of a horror movie,” the Texas agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, said in an interview. He saw distressed cattle infested with screwworm when he was a child in the...

[takebackaustin]

I read that. The whole article is ignorant so I do not assume that statement is accurate. Call it the Gell-Mann effect.

Define ‘treatment”. We know how to destroy the entire population of screwworms over a period of years. We know how to clean a wound. You need to put a tiny amount of insecticide in to kill microscopic larvae in a gel to keep out more flies.

Define “approved”. Probably the disapprovers are the people who won’t let you treat a suffering cow who hasn’t lost her afterbirth with a small injection of DES because some fool at a feedlot fed it every day to every single animal, and can’t treat a single sick suffering from a bacterial infection with a small injection of antibiotic for the same reason.

We knew how to clean a wound and apply a gelly like medicine containing insecticide. But probably a lot of what used to work is frowned on today. It takes a genuine ahole to not allow treatment of individual suffering animals.

[Libloather]

I’m pretty sure Husseincare covers that.

[sockmonkey]

Kerrville TX had a big USDA lab which did research, and the raising of the sterile flies.