A U.S.-Mexico Partnership Beat Screwworms Once. Why Are They Back?

Moisés Vargas-Terán remembers the odd remedies ranchers once used to battle the New World screwworm. In Mexico, they’d rub traditional herbs on wounds into which the insect had burrowed to lay eggs so that its larvae could feast on the living tissue of cattle. Some U.S. livestock producers, meanwhile, poured engine oil on the cuts. The larvae would seep out—but then crawl into the soil and emerge later as flies. “[Ranchers] would say, ‘You’ll never eradicate the screwworm because this came from my grandfather and father, and this is forever,’ ” he recalled.Those old-fashioned measures came before the advent of COMEXA, the Mexican–United States Commission for the Eradication of Screwworm, in 1972. Vargas-Terán, who lives in Mexico City, was an animal health officer with the commission.…

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