This week, Texas advanced plans to build a new sterile fly production facility, an integral part of the government’s strategy to keep the New World Screwworm from devastating the state’s multibillion-dollar livestock industry.
Efforts to build a domestic plant at Moore Air Base in South Texas capable of producing up to 300 million sterile flies weekly have been under development for months, as officials navigate the bureaucracy of making the initiative come to life.
On Monday, the Edinburg facility inched closer to reality, with the Department of Agriculture and the Army Corps of Engineers awarding a $610 million contract to build the plant to Minnesota’s Mortenson Construction. USDA and USACE will break ground on this new facility later this spring, after initial planning and development meetings with the new contractor.
The Texas facility is set to be the United States’ first domestic sterile fly plant, once it is completed in 2027 at the earliest. The U.S. currently relies on a single Panama facility that produces 100 million flies weekly to combat screwworms.
Officials have warned that it is far short of the number needed to effectively address the parasite, which has been inching dangerously close to the Texas border in recent months after traveling out of the Caribbean and South America into northern Mexico.
During the last major screwworm outbreak in Texas decades ago, the U.S. had around 700 million sterile flies on hand weekly. Now, authorities are fighting against time to expand production capacity domestically, since the screwworm holds the capacity to devastate Texas’s cattle and livestock industry, the pride of the state.
TEXAS PREPARES FOR LOOMING SCREWWORM OUTBREAK
The New World Screwworm larvae latch on to open wounds or skin on animals, feeding on their flesh and often leading to the death of infected livestock. Female New World Screwworm flies only mate once in their lives, so if they mate with a sterile male, they lay unfertilized eggs that don’t hatch, making the new Edinburg facility an essential piece of combating the parasitic threat.
“There’s not a magic bullet, as they say, to this situation,” Texas Animal Health Commission communications director Erin Robinson previously told the Washington Examiner. “At the end of the day, if there are screw rooms in Mexico, Texas is going to be on high alert. There is a risk for Texas if screw worms are in Mexico.”
