Federal animal health officials have confirmed a case of New World screwworm in a sheep in Val Verde County, the first detection reported anywhere in the United States since Aug. 5 and the first in that county since the outbreak began.
The case was confirmed Aug. 16 and appears on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s confirmed detections dashboard, maintained by the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. It brings the national total to 46 cases since the first U.S. detection on June 3, all of them in domestic livestock and pets. The dashboard lists the animal as a domestic sheep and the case as active.
The Aug. 16 confirmation ends the longest quiet stretch of the outbreak. The previous newest case was a sheep in Terrell County confirmed Aug. 5, and for 11 days the count held at 45 — a pause the Dispatch reported on Aug. 12. A single case after 11 days is a break in that pattern rather than a surge, and the broader indicators did not move with it.
Those indicators remain where they have been. The dashboard reports zero cases in wildlife or feral animals and zero fly trap detections, meaning no wild screwworm fly has been caught in a surveillance trap in the United States. Active cases actually fell over the same period, from five to four, as older cases were closed out; 42 of the 46 are now listed as inactive. The absence of wildlife cases matters more than the raw count, because deer, feral hogs and other wild animals cannot be gathered, inspected and treated the way a herd can, and a foothold in wildlife is the scenario that would make the outbreak difficult to close.
Val Verde County sits on the Rio Grande in the stretch of West Texas border country where most of the outbreak has been concentrated. It becomes the 16th Texas county to report a case, alongside one in Lea County, New Mexico. The heaviest concentration remains further north and west: Crockett County has recorded 11 of the 46 cases, with five each in Terrell and Edwards counties, four each in Pecos and Brewster, and three each in Sutton and Zavala. Nine counties, now including Val Verde, have recorded a single case.
The affected animals have been almost entirely livestock — sheep, cattle and goats — with one dog. There have been no human cases reported in the United States. The first U.S. detection, on June 3, was in cattle in Zavala County, southwest of San Antonio.
State agencies with a role in the response have meetings on the calendar. The Texas Animal Health Commission, which sets and enforces livestock movement rules and maintains the state’s quarantine zone map, is scheduled to take up its screwworm response Aug. 25. Producers who find a wound with larvae in it are asked to report it to the commission rather than treat and move on, since confirmation depends on samples reaching a laboratory.
What the next dashboard update shows will determine whether Aug. 16 was an isolated confirmation in a new county or the front edge of movement eastward. For now, the count stands at 46, the traps are empty and no wild population has been documented on the U.S. side of the border.