Tag: parasites

US To Open Fly Production Facility For Combating Mexican New World Screwworms

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins launched a facility in South Texas on Wednesday that will release millions of sterile flies to fight the threat of flesh-eating parasites that are infecting cattle in Mexico and could reach the U.S. border soon, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a June 18 statement.

The parasite, New World screwworm (NWS), is a “devastating pest that causes serious and often deadly damage to livestock, wildlife, pets, and in rare cases, humans,” the USDA said. Some U.S. agriculture and cattle industry officials are worried that if the migration isn’t checked, the NWS flies could reach the border by the end of summer.

According to the agency, NWS females lay eggs on wounds or orifices of warm-blooded animals. Once the eggs hatch into larvae, they burrow into the wound and feed off the flesh. As more maggots hatch and feed, the wound becomes deeper and larger. Eventually, it becomes so severe that the host animal dies.

A single female NWS fly can lay up to 3,000 eggs over its lifespan. As such, a large infestation poses considerable risks to farmers raising cows, sheep, and other animals.

In the 1950s, a strategy called sterile insect technique (SIT) was developed, which was used to eradicate NWS from the United States, Mexico, and Central America, the USDA said in an April 2025 document. SIT used gamma radiation to turn NWS pupae into sterile male flies.

When the male flies are released en masse, they mate with wild female flies who end up laying unfertilized eggs, eventually leading to the eradication of these pests.

“While NWS has been eradicated from the United States for decades, recent detections in Mexico as far north as Oaxaca and Veracruz, about 700 miles away from the U.S. border, led to the immediate suspension of live cattle, horse, and bison imports through U.S. ports of entry along the southern border on May 11, 2025,” said the USDA statement.

The facility launched by the agriculture secretary is an $8.5 million sterile NWS fly dispersal site located at Moore Air Base in South Texas.

The United States currently can procure 100 million flies per week from a sterile fly production facility in Panama. The USDA has invested $21 million in a production facility in Mexico that, when operational, will provide another 60-100 million flies weekly. Combined, at least 160 million flies per week are expected to be available for disbursal through the Moore Air Base facility.

In addition, the USDA is also looking at installing a sterile fly production facility at Moore Air Base to complement the new dispersal facility.

“The United States has defeated NWS before, and we will do it again,” said Rollins. “We do not take lightly the threat NWS poses to our livestock industry, our economy, and our food supply chain.

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TERRIFYING: Dangerous Parasite That Eats Animals and Humans Alive Rapidly Marches Toward America With Help from the Mexican Drug Cartels

A dangerous flesh-eating parasite is rapidly marching toward the United States despite several desperate efforts to halt its advance. And one can thank the Mexican drug cartels for this.

As The Atlantic notes, the United States has been fighting an aerial war against the New World screwworm for 70 years. This parasite eats animals alive, including cows, pigs, deer, dogs, and even humans.

The larvae of the parasitic fly harboring the worm rip through flesh and transform small pricks into huge, revolting wounds. Worse, they produce foul-smelling odors resembling sewer gas.

It’s no wonder the worm’s scientific name, C. hominivorax, translates to “man-eater.”

In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an all-out assault to eradicate the screwworm.

Here is how they did it, according to The Atlantic.

Workers raised screwworms in factories, blasted them with radiation until they were sterile, and dropped the sterile adult screwworms by the millions—even hundreds of millions—weekly over the U.S., then farther south in Mexico, and eventually in the rest of North America.

The worm was eradicated from North America and Central America in the 20th century, but things have turned dark.

The outbreak began in Panama, skyrocketing from dozens a year to 1,000, despite ongoing drops of sterile flies. According to the Atlantic, the parasite then began moving northward, at first slowly and then rapidly, by 2024.

As of this month, the parasite has advanced 1,600 miles through eight countries to reach the Mexican States of Oaxaca and Veracruz, just 700 miles away from the Texas border.

According to Mark Eisele, a Cheyenne-based rancher and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the advance of screwworms is partly due to the Mexican drug cartels.

“All we needed to do was keep a flow of those planes. But the cartels were extorting money for every flight of flies that came out of Panama. They were extorting $35,000 a plane,” he said. “So, for all practical purposes, this is really kind of a political closing to make a point that they have got to get their act together.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has responded by indefinitely shutting down animal imports from or transferring through Mexico.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins released a statement on the invasion last week.

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Refusal To Help Stop Flesh-Eating Screwworms Is More Evidence Mexico Is No Friend To America

The United States recently suspended imports of cattle, horses, and bison from Mexico in response to a growing threat: the return of a silent, flesh-eating invader called the New World Screwworm. The screwworm is more than just a bug. It’s a flesh-eating parasite that poses a severe risk to livestock and wildlife and is crawling its way north from Mexico.

If left unchecked, the screwworm could decimate American cattle, horses, and wildlife. And once it’s here, eradicating it could take decades and cost billions. The last time it happened, our livestock industry took 30 years to bounce back.

While Mexico cries foul, it’s time we stop pretending we’re dealing with a friendly, cooperative neighbor. We’re not.

Thankfully, the U.S. is not taking any chances and has responded swiftly and decisively. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins deserves enormous credit for jumping into action. The USDA quickly mobilized, ramping up strategies to stop the outbreak at its source and suspending live animal imports through ports of entry along the southern border on May 11. 

The methods being used are the same ones that successfully eradicated screwworm from the U.S. in 1966: releasing massive numbers of sterile male screwworm flies. A female screwworm fly lives only 30 days, maximum. Since she gets just one chance to mate in this short window, mating with a sterile male means her line ends there. No offspring means no spread. Since each female can lay up to 3,000 flesh-eating larvae, breaking that reproductive cycle is the key to stopping the outbreak.

But for that to work, flights to disperse sterile male flies need to be constant and daily. Mexico knows this but still imposed restrictions, limiting USDA sterile fly dispersal flights and imposing customs duties on the tools needed for the job, such as plane parts, fly shipments, and dispersal equipment, delaying every aspect of the operation. Let that sink in: As a deadly parasite inches toward our border, the Mexican government is nickel-and-diming the planes and tools we’re using to stop it. That’s not cooperation. That’s sabotage.

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Engineering Toxoplasma gondii secretion systems for intracellular delivery of multiple large therapeutic proteins to neurons

Delivering macromolecules across biological barriers such as the blood–brain barrier limits their application in vivo. Previous work has demonstrated that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that naturally travels from the human gut to the central nervous system (CNS), can deliver proteins to host cells. Here we engineered T. gondii’s endogenous secretion systems, the rhoptries and dense granules, to deliver multiple large (>100 kDa) therapeutic proteins into neurons via translational fusions to toxofilin and GRA16. We demonstrate delivery in cultured cells, brain organoids and in vivo, and probe protein activity using imaging, pull-down assays, scRNA-seq and fluorescent reporters. We demonstrate robust delivery after intraperitoneal administration in mice and characterize 3D distribution throughout the brain. As proof of concept, we demonstrate GRA16-mediated brain delivery of the MeCP2 protein, a putative therapeutic target for Rett syndrome. By characterizing the potential and current limitations of the system, we aim to guide future improvements that will be required for broader application.

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