Inside the Shocking Screwworm Outbreak Threatening America’s Beef Industry and What It Means for You
Whether cutting that program helped cause the current outbreak is a different question. While there’s a connection, it’s hard to draw a definitive straight line.
uacescomm/FlickrAfter landing on a host, the New World screwworm fly can lay up to 300 eggs at once.
Are Screwworms A Danger To Humans?
The New World screwworm feeds on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals as well as humans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports.
Female flies are attracted to open wounds (even a tick bite is enough) and body openings (like the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or genitals) and can lay 200 to 300 eggs at a time. The maggots burrow in and feed on living flesh.
Symptoms can include painful skin wounds or sores that worsen within a few days, foul odor from the site of the infestation, and bleeding from open sores.
Human cases in the U.S. are rare, typically showing up in travelers returning from Central or South America, but they can happen.
What The USDA Is Doing To Fight This Outbreak
Wikimedia CommonsIf screwworm maggots are not dealt with, they can kill their host within a matter of days.
The main strategy in fighting screwworm infections is the sterile insect technique, which involves releasing millions of sterile male flies to mate with wild females until the population collapses. This is the very technique that allowed the U.S. to virtually eradicate the screwworm in the 1970s.
North America’s only sterile fly facility is in Panama and produces about 100 million flies per week. The USDA broke ground this year on a $750 million facility at Moore Air Base in South Texas, due to open in mid-2027.
All That’s Interesting reached out to @ouisteffani for comment via TikTok direct message.
For more on what screwworms actually are, read about the grossest parasites that can actually infect the human body. And if that’s not enough, here are five more parasites that are stranger than you could even imagine.
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