Screwworm Reaches the County Next Door to El Paso

The outbreak finally found a county that borders El Paso, and it did it in a county defined more by the road running through it than by what grazes on it.

Two bovines in Hudspeth County tested positive for New World screwworm, the Texas Animal Health Commission recorded in an executive director order signed Saturday, Oct. 24. The order created Infested Zone 25 and put it in force immediately, which means warm-blooded animals inside the mapped area cannot leave without the commission's prior authorization, an inspection, a treatment and a movement certificate naming the product used and the animal's official identification. Hides, carcasses and any host-animal parts need inspection before they cross the boundary too. Executive Director Lewis R. Dinges signed it, and it stays in effect until the commission releases the zone.

The same day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Veterinary Services Laboratories confirmed four new cases, according to a Texas Department of Agriculture statement issued Monday morning: the two Hudspeth County cattle, a cow in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and a ram in the same New Mexico county.

Hudspeth is not like the counties that came before it on this map. It is 4,572 square miles — larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined — and it holds roughly 3,200 people, with Sierra Blanca as the county seat and Fort Hancock as its biggest community. Interstate 10 runs its length. So does the Rio Grande, and so does the line with Mexico. El Paso County sits against its western edge; Culberson County on the east; Jeff Davis and Presidio to the south; Otero County, New Mexico, to the north.

That last detail is the uncomfortable one. Otero County recorded a New World screwworm case in a cow on Oct. 21. Doña Ana County, which borders El Paso County on the New Mexico side, added a cow and a ram on Oct. 24. The corridor running north from the border at El Paso now has detections on both of the counties that flank it.

Every Texas county named in this outbreak until now lay east of Hudspeth — the Trans-Pecos cluster around Pecos, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Reeves, Presidio and Terrell, and the Rio Grande counties of Val Verde, Edwards, Schleicher, Sutton, Crockett, Starr and Zapata. The commission's notice page, checked Monday, lists thirteen counties under current movement restrictions and now includes Hudspeth alongside the rest.

What that means on the ground is mostly paperwork, and the paperwork is the point. A rancher moving calves off a Hudspeth pasture to a feedlot in another county needs a certified inspector, a treatment and a certificate before the trailer rolls. So does anyone hauling a horse, a goat, an exotic or a show animal out of the zone, and so does anyone leaving with a hide in the bed of a pickup. Unauthorized movement is written into every one of these orders as an administrative matter and a criminal one.

Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller used the confirmations to press Washington again, in language aimed at the pace of the federal response rather than the state's.

"The New World screwworm threat has not gone away, not by a long shot," Miller said in the statement. "These latest cases are a stark reminder that this parasite remains a clear and present danger to Texas livestock, the livelihoods of our ranchers, and our national food security."

He asked for expanded sterile fly production and deployment, more surveillance, faster detection and what the release calls additional tools. "We cannot play defense forever," he said. "We've got to take the fight to the screwworm, and we've got to do it now."

Neither agency published a running federal total with Monday's statement. The last figure in circulation was 61 animal cases since June, the count Texas Public Radio reported on Oct. 23 alongside the first wildlife detection of the outbreak — a hunter-harvested elk in Pecos County. A screwworm fly caught in a Brewster County surveillance trap on Sept. 25 is tracked separately, because fly finds are not animal cases. The commission's situation page puts Texas at 19 counties with a confirmed detection and 49 premises since the index case in Zavala County on June 3.

The geography of the western move is what has veterinarians in this part of the state paying attention. Hudspeth is high desert with irrigated pockets along the river, and the standard assumption about a subtropical flesh fly is that it prefers the wetter country to the east. But livestock move on roads, and this county is a road. The interstate that crosses it carries cattle trucks between El Paso, Van Horn, Fort Stockton and points east all week, and the county's two border crossings at Fort Hancock and Tornillo feed the same corridor.

The one brake anyone has named out loud is weather — the argument that pupae in the soil cannot survive a stretch of hard freezing, which New Mexico's state veterinarian laid out in a briefing late last week. It is a real argument and it is not a plan. Late October in the Rio Grande valley has not yet produced the kind of cold that argument depends on, and in the same week the zone appeared, federal agriculture officials were scheduled to reopen a third southern cattle port in New Mexico.

For producers in Hudspeth, Culberson, El Paso and the counties around them, the operational advice has not changed since June: inspect animals for wounds, check ears, eyes, noses, mouths and the tissue between hooves, treat wounds promptly, and call the commission at 800-550-8242 before moving anything that has hair on it. That call is now the first item on a longer list for a corner of the state that had been reading about this outbreak from a distance since spring.