FALFURRIAS, Texas—Mesquite thorns scraped Dr. Michael Vickers’s white ranch truck like nails on a chalkboard as he drove through the underbrush of his South Texas ranch searching for cattle.

The longtime Texas veterinarian has about 100 head at his 1,000-acre ranch just south of Falfurrias, where deer, wild turkey, and javelin—akin to wild pigs—roam freely.

Vultures glide overhead, ever watchful in a blue sky.

Vickers told The Epoch Times that ranches such as his are in the crosshairs of the New World screwworm, which devastated Texas livestock and wildlife in the 1970s.

​Vickers, who served on the Texas Animal Health Commission, called the screwworms a catastrophic threat. They began showing up in Central America two years ago and now threaten the U.S. cattle industry and food supply.

He said the United States is ill-prepared to deal with an outbreak.

“We don’t have the facilities to combat it like we did back in the ‘70s,” Vickers said.

Horror on the Range

As a 22-year-old veterinarian fresh out of college, Vickers was thrust into the Texas screwworm crisis. He’ll never forget the stench of rotting flesh from the screwworms.

Livestock, wildlife, and birds were eaten alive—some left with gaping wounds the size of grapefruit.

Screwworm flies will also infect people. Such a case was documented at a Maryland hospital in August after a person returned from a visit to El Salvador.

“We even had some people in some nursing homes here, and some elderly people die from screwworms with the larvae getting in their nostrils and migrating up into their brains,” Vickers said in a previous interview.

The ears of cattle and horses were eaten off, and sometimes the worms would eat into the middle ear, he said. Some had their eyes eaten out.

Vickers would use a dart gun to knock out infected animals so he could kill the worms burrowed into their flesh, then treat the wounds.

In those days, he used Pink Lady, a substance the color of Pepto-Bismol, or a black tar medication called Smear 62. Both contained now-banned pesticides and chemicals, although there is currently an FDA-approved Pink Lady wound dressing on the market.

When Vickers came across animals too far gone, he would euthanize them. Some ranchers shot terminally ill animals to put them out of their misery.

Screwworm infestations begin when a female screwworm fly lays eggs on a wound or the mucus membranes of a mammal, including humans.

A wound as minor as a tick bite can attract a female fly to feed. A single female can produce about 3,000 eggs in a lifespan that can last up to 30 days.

Eggs hatch into larvae, or maggots, that burrow into the flesh of animals and begin to eat. The last major screwworm outbreak in Texas began in 1972 with 90,000 reported cases, and was mostly contained by 1975.

The screwworm’s recent northward advance coincided with a surge of illegal immigrants crossing the Darien Gap, a stretch of jungle between Panama and Colombia, once a natural barrier.

Vickers said he thinks that it’s likely that the deadly parasite will once again invade Texas, bringing a repeat of the grisly scenes he encountered half a century ago.

Sterile Flies Needed

​The situation became more urgent when the screwworm was found 70 miles from Texas this fall.

Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture confirmed that the parasite was detected in two unrelated cattle shipments from the Veracruz area of southern Mexico north to Nuevo Leon in September and October.​

In a statement, Mexico’s National Service for Agro-Alimentary Health, Safety, and Quality (SENASICA) said the worms were contained before they could develop into flies.

SENASICA said its protocols were effective in mitigating “the risk of [screwworm] propagation.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has focused on producing sterile screwworm flies to shield the $100 billion U.S. cattle industry. But not enough sterile flies are being produced.

The lone fly-producing plant near Panama City, Panama, produces a maximum of 100 million sterile screwworm flies each week. To push the screwworm flies back to the Darien Gap, the USDA estimates that 500 million flies would need to be released weekly.

Sterile males mate with females, causing them to lay unviable eggs—a key strategy in past eradications.

This summer, the USDA blocked Mexican cattle imports and announced that it would invest $21 million to renovate a fruit fly production facility in Metapa, Mexico, to provide an additional 60 million to 100 million sterile screwworm flies.

Also, 750,000 sterilized flies are being trucked in and dispersed in the Nuevo León region twice per week, according to an X post by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins.

Rollins announced the construction of an $8.5 million sterile insect dispersal facility at Moore Air Force Base in Edinburg, Texas, expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Additionally, she announced a $750 million facility at the base that could “boost domestic sterile fly production by up to 300 million flies per week and could complement current production that already exists in Panama and Mexico.”​

Fly Bait Debate

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The Epoch Times that he wants to see more aggressive action. At stake is Texas’s $15 billion cattle industry, not counting billions tied to hunting wildlife. He said an outbreak would increase the cost of beef, noting that 15 percent of feeder cattle comes from Mexico.

Currently, too few sterile flies are being produced to curb the outbreak, he said.​

“It nearly wiped out our cattle industry before. Time is of the essence,” he said.

Miller proposed that the USDA use Swormlure-5, a fly bait that mimics the smell of an open wound, combined with a pesticide. He said this strategy worked in past outbreaks.

Miller said he believes that putting out a bait and pesticide combination in Mexico could help prevent the screwworms from reaching the United States. However, he said the USDA deemed the plan “environmentally insensitive,” stating that it would also harm beneficial flies.

When questioned about Miller’s idea, the USDA told The Epoch Times in an email that the bait traps Miller suggested underperformed during a test in Panama, attracting only “one single New World Screwworm fly.”

Other potential solutions include a new ivermectin feed additive for livestock and deer populations, and a cattle vaccine being developed to kill screwworm larvae.

Texas plans to monitor the situation by placing fly bait traps in three high-risk zones.

Locations include the Texas–Mexico border west of Laredo to Brownsville, a distance of about 200 miles. Other sites include the Texas Department of Agriculture’s Export Pens in Del Rio, El Paso, Laredo, and Houston, as well as the port regions of Galveston and Corpus Christi.

Still, Miller predicts that all the southern United States will be infested with screwworms within the four years it takes to build a facility to produce sterile flies.

“We’re just sitting around trying to design a fly factory. That’s it. We don’t have any other plan,” he said.

Ivermectin, Pink Lady wound dressing, and doramectin, which kills parasites, will be important if the screwworms make it into Texas.

At Las Palmas Veterinary Hospital, Vickers was on the phone with clients last week, letting them know he had plenty of doramectin on hand.

Skeeter Schneider, 68, ranches 3,600 acres in South Texas. He said he will likely use an insecticide for parasites on his cattle. Ivermectin mixed with deer corn could also help protect deer. But there is no way to protect all of the wildlife, he said.

“I think they started way too late,” he told The Epoch Times when asked about the government response.

Presnall Cage, a third-generation rancher who raises cattle on a 43,000-acre South Texas ranch, said the logistical challenges of protecting cattle are daunting.

After serving in the Air Force, he came home as the screwworm invasion hit in the 1970s,  he told The Epoch Times.

At one point, 1,100 cases of screwworms were identified on the ranch in a single year, Cage said.

​Back then, the ranch had 10 cowboys who knew what they were doing, working 14 hours a day for a month straight to deal with the outbreak. Maggots would infect the navels of nearly every calf. Their mothers would lick their navels, which helped remove some maggots, but not enough.

“Left untreated, they all would die,” Cage said.

Cowboys worked nonstop, roping calves and tying them to trees so they could be treated and released.

“Black medicine got all over everything, and you would put it on the wound, and it instantaneously killed the worms,” Cage said. “The cowboys would go back every three or four days and re-doctor the calves.”

As winter approaches, cooler weather should help keep the screwworms south of the border, he said. He reckons the real challenge could come this spring if the flies make it into Texas. That’s when the weather warms and calving season begins.

Administering antiparasitics such as doramectin will be a challenge because it lasts only 14 days, which makes it impractical to use when you have 1,500 cows that need to be rounded up, he said.

​“The biggest problem we have now is just a lack of cowboys to be able to handle the situation,” Cage said. “That’s what scares me more than anything.”​

Nowadays, there are few cowboys left who know their way around a ranch. Most who show up to work are young with no experience.

“Some of the cattle cowboys have never even hardly been on a horse before now,” he said.

Without enough cowboys to deal with a new outbreak, the losses could be significant, he said.

Reality or Hype

Some people think the screwworm threat is overblown.

Lalo Garza, owner of Triple G Livestock Auction near Rio Grande City, called the accounts of the parasites being 70 miles away “fake.”

As for now, East said he’s not sure how ranchers can prepare until the screwworms make it across the Rio Grande into the United States.

“What do you do until it gets here? I’m waiting on the government to do something,” he said.