U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins provided an update on the New World Screwworm response on Tuesday where she discussed what would happen if a detection were to occur in the United States. “We are preparing to implement the very moment the fly makes it into our country. If we have a domestic detection USDA and relevant state animal health officials will immediately put in place quarantines and movement restrictions to limit the pest spread,” said Secretary Rollins.
Rollins also said “We will initiate additional trapping and surveillance in the immediate area. We will release sterile New World Screwworm flies in the area to eliminate any reproducing New World Screwworm populations. The response will be scientifically tailored to the specific nature of the detection.”
“Whether it is a wild fly found in a trap, larva detected in livestock, or a detection in a wild animal, we are ready. USDA and our state partners will work hand in hand to address the incident and we will communicate every step of the process with the public,” Rollins added
Southeast AgNet also caught up with Ethan Lane, Vice President of Government Affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, who shared his thoughts on the preparations so far.
“The preparations that have been made over the last year, the work that Secretary Rollins and her team at USDA have done, the work that the cattle industry has done with state animal health officials to make sure that there’s money and dirt moving on sterile fly production, to make sure that we have movement plans in place, both at the federal and state level, to ensure that when we have screwworm infections on the U.S. side of the border, supply chain continues to move and put beef onto store shelves and in consumers’ kitchens throughout the country, making sure that we have emergency use authorizations for animal drugs that can help fight screwworm problems when producers identify them in their cattle, and making sure that there’s education going out the door so that producers are armed with the resources they need to navigate this in the future as we push this pest back down into Mexico, back down to Panama, and back down into its box where we’ve kept it since the 1960s,” said Lane.
Lane also said, “I think that there is a lot of growing recognition of the fact that we are a year down the road from sort of, you know, the beginning of summer last year where we were worried, we might have screwworm by August of last year. Here we sit a year later, and we still do not have it yet, but we need to start planning for the fact that we probably will. And those plans are in place, and we are feeling very good about the fact that we’re ready to deal with this problem as it approaches our doorstep, thanks to the hard work of all those folks.”
While there are no confirmed cases of New World Screwworm inside the United States at this time, producers are encouraged to go to www.screwworm.gov for the most up-to-date information on New World Screwworm.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.