The count of New World screwworm has held at 32 confirmed animal cases for a full week, the longest plateau since the pest crossed into Texas in early June. Federal and state agencies continue to press an eradication campaign built on quarantines and sterile flies.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the last confirmed detection was a sheep in Crockett County, verified July 3. As reported by Texas Public Radio, the 32 cases — 31 in Texas and one in New Mexico — span 12 Texas counties and 23 separate premises, all in domestic livestock and animals, with no wildlife detections and no locally acquired human cases.
The pause in new detections does not signal an all-clear. APHIS last updated its current-status page on July 7 and continues to list all southern ports of entry as closed to livestock trade, a restriction USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins first imposed on July 9, 2025. Mexico has since suspended most U.S. live-animal imports of its own, leaving cross-border livestock trade effectively frozen in both directions.
The Texas Animal Health Commission has placed parts of 21 counties under movement restrictions, meaning warm-blooded animals cannot leave those zones without a certified inspection first. The commission and APHIS say response teams are conducting surveillance, wound treatment and both ground and aerial releases of sterile male flies inside a designated infested zone.
The sterile insect technique, which floods an area with sterilized males so wild females produce no offspring, eradicated screwworm from the United States decades ago and remains the core of the current strategy. Governor Greg Abbott has urged livestock and pet owners to report any suspicious wounds or larvae to the state commission immediately. Officials emphasize the outbreak is not a food-safety issue; infested animals cannot be sold or processed for meat, and the U.S. food supply remains unaffected.
Production capacity is moving forward. On June 27, Rollins joined Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to open a sterile-fly production plant in Metapa, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, a facility USDA supported with a $21 million investment.
As reported by Border Report, the plant is expected to ramp to roughly 50 million sterile flies a week within 12 weeks and as many as 100 million a week by year’s end, supplementing output from the long-running COPEG plant in Panama. In Texas, USDA broke ground in April on a domestic production facility at Moore Air Base near Edinburg and has stood up a fly-dispersal center to distribute sterile insects across the response area.
USDA has moved on other fronts as the case count climbed. The Food and Drug Administration on June 11 issued an emergency use authorization for a generic over-the-counter drug to treat screwworm in dogs and cats. And on July 4, the department publicly responded to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has pressed for additional tools including a feed-based treatment, defending its sterile-fly-centered approach.
The unresolved question is when, and whether, USDA reopens the westernmost ports of entry. Rollins spent the spring signaling a possible risk-based reopening at the lowest-risk crossings, hundreds of miles from any known case, but the department has said any move remains tied to sterile-fly capacity and containment benchmarks. Whether this week’s plateau holds — and the dashboard count stays at 32 — will shape that decision in the weeks ahead.