A Quick Primer on the Mexican Screw Worm Fixn’ to Screw You at the Meat Counter

Trump is humming along in most instances, but he is having a time with people’s perception of the economy.

For all that price increases have chilled out – and they have – they are still too damn high. The Trump administration has to tread that very thin line between touting their admirable gains on wrestliing things back into some semblance of normalcy (which admittedly takes time, especially after the inflationary POTATUS years), and allowing themselves to become frustrated with the general public’s lack of appreciation for what they’ve accomplished.

It would be easy but fatal to slip into a Bidenomics-type lecturing trap. I don’t see cabinet members like Treasury Secretary Bessent falling prey to that, but the president does get his nose out of joint when he feels the results of his Herculean efforts aren’t receiving their due.

There’s a ton of positive, even amazing things happening.

Fed: Household wealth grew $12 trillion last year.

Twenty times faster than Biden.

What drove it:
– Blockbuster economic growth
– Tax cuts and deregulation
– American workers replacing foreigners
– Deportations opening blue-collar jobs at twice the pay pic.twitter.com/J2c5CxVkYk

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) January 28, 2026

But to the average mom in a grocery store with, say two kids and a husband to feed, the prices are still too damn high. It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump didn’t raise them. She knows that…maybe. But she wants to know why so many of them haven’t mellowed significantly.

One of the problems is that the foodstuffs that got people through when times were tight are some of the more persistently expensive now. 

One of those is hamburger. Ground beef is a king’s ransom, and is what is used to feed families who need to stretch meals out. A quick innerwebs check gives me a $6 lb average for your regular 80/20 mix.

That’s a lot of money when just a few years ago it was half of that, if not even cheaper sometimes with a good sale at a discount grocer.

It’s a staple and ouch.

Times have been incredibly hard for beef producers, too, and that has compounded the problem at the checkout counter.

The American beef industry has been in an ongoing crisis cycle since about 2019, and herds have been in a precipitous decline the entire time.

This year, US cattle herds hit a 75-year low.

• Persistent Drought: Years of dry weather across Western states and the Great Plains decimated pasturelands, forcing ranchers to sell off breeding stock they could no longer afford to feed.
• Incentivized Slaughter: Record-high market prices have ironically hindered recovery; many ranchers are choosing to sell young heifers for immediate profit rather than keeping them to rebuild their herds.
• Processing Strains: The lack of available cattle has forced major processors like Tyson Foods to shutter facilities, including a massive plant in Nebraska that recently employed 3,200 workers.

There have also been the pressures of hostile administrations weighing on ranchers and farmers.

You forgot to mention Biden’s grazing policies that forced some ranches out of business and others to curtail their herds. Primary culprit is the changes to the Public Lands Rule. It will take several years to rebuild herds.

— pharout73 (@pharout73) February 6, 2026

Industry analysts said there’s been no sign yet of serious rebuilding efforts and, since it takes two years to raise a calf from birth to slaughter, any effort now wouldn’t result in lower beef prices until 2028 at the earliest.

Trump can’t fix time.

This lack of supply is responsible for the prices, which were up 19% last year alone.

Supply is also staring down the possibility of another brutal blow as the Mexican screw worm works its way back over the Rio Grande into Texas beef herds.

To understand the latest problem, read this piece by Texas-based colleague @j_lovinger on the spread of the New World screwworm — and why it matters a lot. https://t.co/bHbEkmA4Go

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) February 6, 2026

Ranchers there are terrified of what the worm’s encroachment means, and the fact that the United States no longer has the means to fight it off they once did.

Chris Womack is one of a dwindling number of Texas ranchers who can remember fighting the New World screwworm, a once-vanquished pest threatening to make an unwanted encore in the US after its recent return to northern Mexico.

“You never forget the smell,” Womack, 60, said of his first encounter with a calf being devoured by screwworm maggots. It was one of many he and his father would treat in the early 1970s as an outbreak of the parasite — which can kill cattle in less than two weeks — devastated Texas ranchers.

More than 50 years later, Womack and other Texas cattlemen are bracing for the screwworm’s potential comeback. Cases are proliferating in a Mexican state that borders Texas, with the pest having escaped containment by an international eradication program that banished it for decades. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration last week to open up state resources for the screwworm response.

The pest’s resurgence would squeeze the $130 billion US cattle industry, which is already struggling with a record-low herd and rising costs. The screwworm prompted the US to ban cattle imports from Mexico for much of the last 14 months, crimping American beef producers at a time when record prices for the meat are adding to the pressure on shoppers angry about the cost of food.

This nasty, voracious bugger not only targets and decimates cattle herds. It’ll chomp on anything and it is just revolting.

…Screwworm flies lay their eggs in open wounds or membranes in warm-blooded animals. When the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow deep into the flesh with hook-like mouths, lending the pest its name. While they most frequently land on livestock and wild animals, they can also infest pets like cats and dogs, and even humans. Victims can develop large open wounds covered in maggots.

It’s treatable. But the rub for ranchers is that if screwworm reestablishes itself in the US, they’ll have to closely inspect their herds – a major challenge in Texas, where ranches can spread across hundreds of acres and labor is scarce. Sick cattle tend to hide away in brush, requiring fine-toothed surveillance to locate and treat them.

An outbreak could cost Texas cattle producers $732 million and deal a $1.8 billion blow to the state economy, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Texas, with its famous history of cattle drives and cattlemen, still has a bigger herd than any other state, with 12.1 million head — about 14% of total US inventory.

The last time the worm invaded, it was successfully eradicated by a sterile fly introduction. Irradiated screw fly males were released into the wild by the hundreds of millions to mate with wild females, and voila!

Eventually, you reach the point of no baby buggies.

Sadly, those facilities for neutering male screw worm flies – a ‘fly-production’ facility – are all gone now.

Hindsight is 20/20, and regrets? 

They have a few.

…The eradication program, which depends on releasing enormous swarms of sterilized screwworm flies into the wild, can’t be fully revived in the short term. So Womack, who is also a veterinarian, said he’s worried ranchers in Texas will have to relearn the grisly, time-consuming work of protecting herds from the pest.

…If it took decades to push the screwworm out, it took less than five years for the bug to make a comeback.

“This was so effective, I never thought I would be working on screwworm,” said Phillip Kaufman, head of the Department of Entomology at Texas A&M University.

The best way to kill screwworms hasn’t significantly changed since the 1960s. Scientists use radioactive carbon to sterilize screwworm flies, which they release over infested areas. The sterile males then mate with females, who only reproduce once in a lifetime. Over time, populations dwindle. Repeated releases keep resurgences at bay.

…But full-scale eradication requires a fly-production capacity the US has lost and can’t rebuild for years, even according to optimistic estimates. The eradication campaign required facilities that could produce 500 million sterile flies each week. Currently, global production is concentrated at a single facility in Panama that maxes out at 100 million.

In 1977, the USDA moved its screwworm research facility from an old air base in southern Texas to Mexico. Then, when the US and Mexico dissolved their joint screwworm commission in 2012, the US handed over that facility to the Mexican government, which shut it down soon as the threat waned.

They grow them at a production facility in Panama now that can only pump out 100M flies a week, no where what they need. Belatedly, a new US facility is being built, but it’s going to take time ranchers don’t have.

…Officials are now working to rebuild production capacity in North America, leading with a $750 million investment in restarting the Texas air base facility.

The USDA hopes to produce 100 million sterile flies there per week by the spring of 2027, and 300 million by 2029, officials told Texas legislators at a hearing in December. The US also gave Mexico $21 million to help retrofit a fruit-fly facility near the Guatemalan border to produce screwworms as soon as summer 2026.

“We desperately need those flies,” Kaufman said.

The US economy desperately needs those flies, too.

Apparently, the treatment is a vile-smelling paste that has to be smeared on the affected animal once you’re lucky enough to find the poor thing.

When herds number in the thousands and spread over thousands of acres, that will be labor-intensive and expensive just to find suffering animals.

Money, money, money on all sides of the equation.

What Bidenomics accelerated is going to take time to unwind, and it will never come ‘down,’ as in ‘back to what it was. 

Food prices are continuing their rapid accent as inflation reaccelerates; if you’ve seen wholesale prices for beef and eggs lately, you know consumer prices are going to keep spiking; the Biden legacy is unaffordable food: pic.twitter.com/57wm3WRNjF

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) January 15, 2025

It can only level off and maybe even drop a bit if we’re lucky. 

As Trump’s never going to win an argument with the forces of nature, his team has to be ready to make sure that Americans know the whole score.

Trump can only hope to let people know how hard he’s working to lift the American people up.