By dropping the sterile, fully developed flies, the USDA plans to prevent flesh-eating maggots from reaching the United States. Here’s how.
The United States plans to bring back a somewhat shocking, but very effective, campaign to fight a flesh-eating parasitic fly that’s been sighted in Mexico.
The plan: Breed millions of sterilized flies and drop them over the Texas-Mexican border to protect the more than $100 billion U.S. cattle and beef industry from the New World screwworm (NWS).
“This can kill a thousand-pound cow in two weeks,” said Dr. Michael Bailey, president-elect of the American Veterinary Medical Association. “The federal government is being very aggressive in working to contain this.”
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. A similar effort worked well decades ago.
As the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a release, “The U.S. has defeated NWS before and can successfully do it again.”
The effort works by sterilizing male screwworm flies so that when they mate with females the resulting eggs are infertile. Over time so few fertile eggs are created that the fly is eradicated altogether.
An effort across the U.S., Mexico and Central America that began in the 1950s was so successful this flying menace was totally eradicated north of Panama, except for a few tiny outbreaks. The U.S control program cost $32 million and was ended in the 1960s.
But this past November, Mexico’s Chief Veterinary Officer notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that a New World screwworm had been found in a cow in southern Mexico close to the border with Guatemala.