Public Health Workers Issue Grim Warning About Flesh-Eating Parasite After Texas Town Is Quarantined

A deadly flesh-eating parasite that creates festering sores by gruesomely burrowing into its prey’s skin has been detected in the U.S. for the first time in 60 years and public health workers are warning of a potential outbreak!

As Globe went to press, officials were enforcing a 12-mile quarantine zone around tiny La Pryor, Texas, a rural town of around 1,200 people some 30 miles from the Mexican border, where the return of the New World (NW) screwworm had been registered for the first time since it was eradicated from America in 1966, as reported by NBC News.

The parasites get their name from their hellish ability to dig headfirst into a victim’s flesh in the same way a screw does wood. No known medicine can cure an infestation — and the only way to get rid of the critters is by having a doctor excruciatingly search for them surgically.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such horrific infestations occur when an NW screwworm fly lays its eggs — hundreds at a time — in the open wounds or, seemingly worse, eyes, nose or ears of humans or animals.

When the eggs hatch, the resulting larvae consume the surrounding tissue, digging deeper and deeper as time passes. If the infestation is not treated, the host will eventually die, according to the CDC.

The La Pryor, Texas, infestation was discovered in a three-week-old bovine calf, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said, per NBC. Another case was found in February in a horse that had come to the U.S. from Argentina. The last human case in America dates to last year, when a woman returning from El Salvador tested positive.

Rollins said federal officials were working to eradicate the NW screwworm flies by releasing sterile males into the wild near the Mexican border. Since females only typically mate once, those female flies mating with the sterile male ones will not produce offspring, the CDC said.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller branded the Department of Agriculture’s response to the infestation as “slow, bureaucratic and incomplete” and said it would take “years to fully implement,” according to the Texas Department of Agriculture website.

In fact, with multiple NW screwworm cases now detected in Mexico as close as 25 miles from the U.S. border, Miller appealed directly to President Donald Trump to “throw every available federal resource at this threat before it becomes a full-blown agricultural disaster.”