Six Texas universities are among the recipients of a $105 million federal research push against the New World screwworm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed, as the domestic case count held at 35 for a fifth consecutive day with no new detection reported since a July 10 goat in Crockett County.
The awards flow from the USDA’s New World Screwworm Grand Challenge, a competition the department launched in January as part of its five-pronged eradication strategy. USDA is funding 40 projects nationwide out of 226 applications that together requested about $664 million, according to the Texas Farm Bureau. The funded work spans improvements to the sterile insect technique, new traps and lures, treatments and therapeutics, artificial-intelligence-enabled surveillance and drone monitoring, as reported by KXAN.
Texas recipients include projects led by Texas Tech University, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, The University of Texas at Arlington, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the university awards show. The concentration of grants in Texas reflects the state’s position at the front line of the outbreak: the first domestic detection in more than half a century was a three-week-old calf in Zavala County confirmed June 3.
The research money arrives during a pause in new detections. USDA has confirmed 35 infestations, 34 in Texas and one in New Mexico, according to the APHIS confirmed-detections dashboard. All confirmed cases are in livestock and pets. There is no confirmed locally acquired human case and no confirmed Texas wildlife detection, and USDA says the parasite is not a food-safety threat because it feeds on living tissue in open wounds, not on meat intended for consumers.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s says that all southern ports of entry remain closed to livestock trade under the order Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued July 9, 2025. The Texas Animal Health Commission maintains movement restrictions across parts of more than 20 counties.
Containment still rests on the sterile insect technique, in which sterile male flies are released to collapse the wild population. The Moore Air Base dispersal facility in Edinburg went active in June and has released more than 129 million sterile flies since February, while Mexico’s renovated Metapa plant is ramping toward tens of millions of flies a week. A domestic sterile-fly production plant broke ground at Moore Air Base on April 17 and is projected to open in November 2027. The new university grants are aimed at the tools that would supplement that barrier, from better lures to AI surveillance.
The Texas Dispatch has tracked the outbreak through prior coverage of the tenth quarantine zone at 26 confirmed cases and the San Antonio research partnership announced this month. USDA updates its Mexico case map on Tuesdays and Thursdays and its list of cases within 100 miles of the border each business day, the next chance for the six-day plateau to break.