Screwworms near Texas border; high-tech solutions emerge

AUSTIN (KXAN) — New World Screwworms, a flesh-eating maggot, is closing in on the Texas border.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, New World screwworms is an invasive species that burrows fly larvae into fresh wounds of living animals like livestock, pets and occasionally people. The damage they cause can be deadly.

Earlier this summer, Governor Greg Abbott and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a push to prevent the screwworm from reaching Texas. A new sterile fly production facility is now under construction in Edinburg, TX.

But it may be too late. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the screwworm was spotted in Sabinas Hidalgo, just 70 miles from the U.S./Mexico border.

“We’ve got this thing, its 70 miles from Laredo, its at our back door,” said Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.

While Miller asked for the deployment of TDA Swormlure, a bait that could help officials apply pesticides, other experts are looking at more high-tech solutions.

“There’s nothing more organic than an electron. We are all made up of electrons, and there’s no radioactivity per se. So this is the ultimate case of an organic electron being used to do some great work,” said Suresh Pillai, director of the National Center for Electron Research.

Pillai and his team are working on using electron beams to sterilize screwworm flies. Currently, radioactive isotopes are used to sterilize flies. This technology will be used in the new Edinburg facility.

“It’s absolutely, what I would like to call unnecessary in today’s hypersensitive and hyper secure world,” Pillai said.

Electron beam technology is already in use in Europe, but hasn’t been brought to the U.S. until now.

“We basically take electrons. That’s an electricity accelerated to 99.8% the speed of light, and then they are highly energetic,” he said.

The technology, according to Pillai, could be tested by next October.

However, other technology is available today. Ceres Tag is a tagging system for cattle that allows ranchers to track their herds using GPS.

“We’re able to use the sensor that attaches to the ear, in a smart tag form and be able to monitor their activity and their location of the animal,” said Ceres Tag founder and CEO David Smith.

His tags, which use low Earth orbit satellites owned by Globalstar, can also track behavior and determine if a screwworm infection has occurred.

“The animal will move away from the herd because it’s not, well, it’ll also reduce the amount of intake that it’s consuming,” Smith said.

“Tracking of the animal is really only one real small piece of the puzzle,” said Marty Jefferson with Globalstar. “You can’t predict necessarily where cattle are going to graze, they’re going to graze where they want to graze, unless you’re actually guiding them the whole way.”

Smith says that his technology, which can be deployed today, is not a solution. “We provide you the information to apply the the solution in a timely and accurate manner in the locations that it most needs,” Smith said.