Earlier this month, the United States confirmed its first human case of the New World screwworm in this year’s outbreak, a parasite that burrows into wounds on infected livestock. News agencies around the country officially broke the story on Monday, but the case had been internally confirmed by the Center for Disease Control on August 4. “The risk to public health in the United States from this introduction is very low,” federal Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon assured in a statement.
This month’s case is United States’ first confirmed detection of the parasite in decades — and the country’s first-ever travel-associated case, affecting a patient who had recently traveled to El Salvador.
Ports along the southern border have been closed to cattle importation because of the spread of the parasite, which has been detected within a few hundred miles of the border. On August 15, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the department would spend up to $750 million to build a facility in Texas that produces sterile flies to slow the spread of the disease. The USDA “estimated that 500 million flies must be released weekly to push screwworm back south in Latin America,” per Reuters.