He was only eight years old in 1973, but the Fifth -generation Texas farmer, Kip Dove, remembers having spent countless days jogging towards the sick and dying cattle that year during the last important outbreak of the carnivorous chest. He wore a bottle of smelly medicine, similar to tar, in his saddlebag and an covered revolver to shoot any animal too advanced to treat it.
Surrounded by livestock dogs and jeans howling, infested cattle kicked and bit their open wounds, looking with wild eyes the headlights of trucks that illuminated them and emitted the unmistakable smell of rotten flesh, remember.
Now surrounded by a healthy herd of long -horrific cattle, Dove anticipates the return of the borer worm, the parasitic fly that eats cattle and lively wild life. From 1972 to 1976, an outbreak of a browser worm in the United States informed tens of thousands of head of cattle in six states, cost dozens of millions of dollars to contain it and was only defeated after a massive eradication effort.
Today, parasitic flies are pushing to the north from Central America again after being officially eradicated from the US in 1966, threatening with 1.8 billion dollars in damages only to the Texas economy, according to an estimate of the US Department of Agriculture of the US, an outbreak could further raise the record prices of beef of beef when keeping more calves outside the country’s supply.
The farmers in central Mexico are discovering that the worms of the dreaded fly buried in their cattle for the first time in a generation, and a factory in Panama is losing a race against time to raise sterile flies, the most powerful tool to quell an outbreak. As the cases increase in livestock, and occasionally in humans and domestic pets, the Fly is more likely to infest the US again, Dr. Thomas Lansford, an assistant state veterinarian of the Texas Animal Health Commission, and other experts, told Reuters.
“I don’t know what we are going to do,” said Dove, crossing his arms, marked by decades of horseback riding and chasing cattle through thorny thickets.
The female flies of the boreride worm put hundreds of eggs in the wounds of any hot blood animal. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae use their sharp mouths and hooks to dig through living meat, feeding, enlarging the wound and eventually killing their guest if it is not. A small scratch, a recent brand or a label in the ear in the process of healing can quickly become an open wound, carpeted with worms that twist.
“The smell is bad and some of the wounds are horrible. You have huge holes in these animals full of worms,” said Dove. “I don’t know if I could handle it if it happens now.”
Washington has stopped the imports of cattle from Mexico and invested millions in the creation of a new sterile flies production in Metapa, Mexico. But it will take about a year to be online. Therefore, cattle producers in the US are storing insecticides, making contingency plans and sounding alarm that the scarcity of qualified labor in the ranches will paralyze their ability to detect and treat bare -bare worms.
The treatment is low technology and onerous: veterinarians and ranchers must scrape each worm of hand -infested animals before spraying wounds with an insecticide.
In 1973, Dove was a girl who could bind cattle to receive treatment until 2 am and go to school the next morning. Now, at 60, the accumulated injuries during years of livestock would make the exhausting work to handle cattle during an outbreak, he said.
Freddy Nieto is the manager of El Sauz Ranch in southern Texas, who handles cattle but also offers the wealthy clientele the opportunity to hunt wildlife, from white -tailed deer and wild pigs to exotic animals. “This could be the worst biological outbreak we face in our lives,” he said.
The multimillionaire hunting industry is especially vulnerable since wildlife infested with borer worms is essentially intractable. They often disappear in the thick weed to die because of their wounds.
In the heat and humidity of the city of Panama, a world -renowned biological installation has operated since 2006. Biologists and technicians work in extreme heat conditions surrounded by acres odors, an overwhelming mixture of ammonia and the artificial diet with which the flies of flies are fed, to raise up to 100 million sterile flies of the bullshit worm per week.
Flies feed with a carefully formulated egg, milk and dust hemoglobin that mimics the conditions of a wound. Flies are bombarded with radiation before being released in hot spots, where sterile males will appear with wild females to produce infertile eggs.
Until 2023, sterile flies dropped into the Darién cap, a strip of jungle between Panama and Colombia, to maintain a biological barrier against propagation to the north. They are now being sent to Mexico.
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In the livestock region of Texas, farmers prepare for the carnivorous buger worm
Barrenading worms cannot fly more than 12 miles alone, but they can cover great distances within the meat of their guests, such as cattle, horses and deer. Flies have already passed through the narrower sections of land in Central and North America, the Darien plug in Panama and the isthmus in Mexico, which means that they need to exponentially release more to control the outbreak.
The United States eliminated the barenting worms in the twentieth century by flying airplanes on critical points to drop red striped boxes full of sterile flies, sometimes called “cupcakes” by farmers. The USDA built a flos -production plant in Mission, Texas, in 1962, which pumped 96 billion flies until it was dismantled in 1981. Now the USDA plans to resurrect the plant to disperse sterile flies, while Texas officials have scattered 100 traps for barakeers along the border.
The USDA inspectors known as Tick Riders who patrol the border on horseback to protect against another plague, the cattle fever tick, they also have the task of performing a preventive treatment against the boreride worm for all cattle and horses they find in the border area.
In the heart of the problem there is an unfeasible mathematical equation. The USDA estimated that 500 million flies should be released weekly to push the fly back to the Darien plug. At its maximum, the Panama plant produces only 100 million.
“It’s an overwhelming situation at this time,” said Dr. Lansford. “Obviously, the boreride worm is going well in Mexico, and face the same challenges as us.”
Alfonso López, veterinarian of cattle in Tapachula, Mexico, told Reuters that he sees new cases of boreride worm every day. He showed a tube containing worms collected from a newborn calf hours before. The body of the worm has distinctive rings that allow to twist and bury in the meat of an animal, winning its nickname “screw.” When it is removed from the tube with a couple of tweezers, a worm appears his head, still alive.
The state of Chiapas is the zero zone of the outbreak in Mexico. Infestation in livestock began to emerge here last year and cases in the country are now increasing approximately 10% each week. Until now, almost 50,000 cases have been reported from Panama to Mexico, according to the Panama-United States Commission for the eradication and prevention of the cheap worm.
The farmer Julio Herrera in Tapachula reviews his animals regularly in search of injuries, but said that his efforts can only reach to some extent until the government addresses what he considers the root of the problem. He and other experts say that the increase in migration of cattle and people from Central America has fed expanding outbreak.
The Secretary of Agriculture of the State of Chiapas, Marco Barba, said that federal authorities are reviewing the issue of illegal cattle crosses.
“No country is immune,” Barba said in an interview with Reuters in the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez. The state government has launched a very publicized campaign that encourages producers to carefully review their flocks in search of any barely worm sign and report cases.
Even with the action of the government, many American ranches do not have enough qualified labor to monitor and treat their flocks against the bare -inch worm. They need jeans that can know if the cattle are sick just looking at them, that they do not get apprehensive to the elbow in a cow that gives birth, that can tie and tie temperamental bulls.
Isaac Sulemana, a rancher and lawyer in Sullivan City, Texas, estimated that his ranch would need at least 10 jeans to monitor pastures during an outbreak. It only has two.
Death prevention during a boreride outbreak requires that farmers adopt a punishment routine of monitoring every cattle head every day. But while Dove staggered on a dirt road full of two -way potholes looking for his scattered cattle, the challenges of locating animals, even those of 1,000 pounds, on an expanding ranch were exposed.
“Look at this,” said Dove, pointing to the dense mosque thickets, cat and tuna nail that mark the farmer country of Texas. “Just look at that and think about going and getting your cattle when you don’t want them to catch it.”
Meanwhile, farmers are preparing for the worst.
In May, the cattle rancher of cattle and sheep of western Texas, Warren Cude, third generation, entered a stable where his father kept old medicine boats for the boreride worm and bottles full of dead barenters. He added new spray bottles for wounds and insecticides to the collection.
“We are repeating the story after 50 years. We did not learn from the first time and let those facilities go and now we have to do everything again to combat something we eradicate 50 years ago,” Cude said.
With Reuters information.
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