OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:15 PM – Friday, June 20, 2025
The U.S. government has announced its intention to construct an $8.5 million fly-breeding facility near the U.S.–Mexico border as part of a strategic effort to combat the spread of a parasitic threat to livestock.
The facility, which will be established at Moore Air Base in Texas, will produce millions of “sterile male New World screwworm flies.”
These sterile males will be released into the wild, where they will mate with wild females, thereby curbing reproduction and preventing the emergence of flesh-eating larvae, according to the Associated Press.
Female New World screwworm flies deposit their eggs in open wounds of animals. Upon hatching, the larvae, commonly referred to as maggots, burrow into the host’s tissue — causing severe and potentially fatal damage, the U.S. Department of Agriculture explained.
The Texas facility would be only the second of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.
The recent detection of the New World screwworm fly in Mexico — at locations as close as 700 miles from the U.S. southern border — has heightened concerns among authorities. In response, officials last month temporarily halted imports of cattle, horses, and bison along portions of the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in a press release.
To intensify containment efforts, the USDA is also considering the addition of a secondary breeding facility at the Texas site, which could enable the weekly production of up to 300 million sterile flies.
Furthermore, the executive department plans to invest $21 million to retrofit an existing facility near Mexico’s border with Guatemala for fly production. However, that site is not expected to be operational until the end of 2026, according to the AP.
“The United States has defeated [New World screwworm] before, and we will do it again,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a statement. “We do not take lightly the threat poses to our livestock industry, our economy and our food supply chain.”
The United States has already previously raised and released New World screwworm flies into the wild, which effectively eliminated the insect from the country for decades. While there are remedies for fly infestations, officials are specifically concerned about the economic impact on farms. The larvae can infest both household pets and humans, according to the Associated Press.
- 1966 – Final official eradication (end of wild spread). The New World screwworm was eradicated from the U.S. using a groundbreaking method called the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT).
- 2016–2017 – Controlled outbreak in Florida Keys. The only re-establishment since 1966.
“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,” Mexican Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué stated in a post on X on Wednesday.
Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and other South American countries are a mecca for the New World screwworm flies, according to the USDA.
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