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The Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs hosted a panel of experts during a hearing this week on New World Screwworm. Panelists for the hearing included Deputy Secretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs Dudley Hoskins, Texas Parks and Wildlife Executive Director David Yoskowitz, Texas A&M University Entomology Department Head Phillip Kaufman, and Dr. TR Lansford, DVM and Dr. Brad Dinges, DVM of the Texas Animal Health Commission. Hoskins provided an update on the efforts undertaken by the department as well as an update on the production of sterile male flies.
Hoskins said, “The bottom line is we need more flies. That’s why on March 9th, Secretary Rollins, in partnership with the Army Corps, announced a new contract with Mortensen Construction to build a new sterile fly production facility here at Moore Air Base in Texas. We’ve expedited the permitting of that project. We’ve cut about four or five years off of what would normally be a government project at that facility. And as of right now, we’re expecting 100 million sterile flies to come out of that facility by November 2027 with up to 300 million total by the end of 2028. We’re doing that while we’re also helping Mexico retrofit their facility in Metapa.”
“The construction should be completed later this summer. Once the construction is completed, we’ll build the brood. And Mexico’s reported we should have about 100 million sterile flies coming out of that facility by the end of the year. I mention all this because the sum total of those facilities and that sterile fly production will give us about 500 sterile flies per week, which is the number we needed in 1966 when we declared ourselves free of screwworm,” said Hoskins.
Kaufmann shared his thoughts on the potential cause for the accelerated progress of the screwworm, saying, “It’s important to understand that this fly, it’s not a monarch butterfly that is on a migration every year trying to get further and further north. This fly moves because humans load animals onto trailers or vehicles and drive them many hundreds of miles. That’s why we traditionally had this fly get into the Midwestern states, the Great Plains states, was humans moved animals to those areas during the summertime. The fly does very well in the summer conditions. But in essence, this is a tropical fly that makes incursions into temperate areas.”
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.