The Cattle Industry Summer Business Meeting recently wrapped up in San Diego, California. While the session covered multiple topics, one was of grave concern to the U.S. cattle industry. Michael Kelsey, executive vice president of the Oklahoma State Cattlemen’s Association, said topic number one was the advancing New World screwworm.

“While we were in San Diego, we had developments regarding the discovery of the movement of the screw worm north in Mexico to Veracruz, and the secretary responded to off-ramp the border process that she had instituted. So, I mean, even while we’re there, we’re still having those things and a lot of discussion about the screw worm, and we’ve got to take this seriously. And we are. We’re taking this very seriously, much more seriously than Mexico is. At the same time, we have a lot of planning to do, a lot of work to do, and, which leads me to, I so appreciate the leadership of Dr Hall – Dr Rod Hall, Oklahoma State Veterinarian – and what he’s doing to help us prepare for because it truly is – and I think we just need to be truthful with ourselves – it’s not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.”

Unfortunately, the screwworm isn’t far away from the southern U.S. border.

“It’s not very far at all. And so, there are things that we talked about. For instance, a good question came up about a storm. We’re in the hurricane season. We’re coming into the hurricane season here. Can a hurricane move the fly to a degree? Really good information about that. A fly is not a virus. You know, a virus can survive those types of events, whereas a fly is pretty fragile. An actual hurricane probably really wouldn’t move a fly very much because it’s so fragile. The wings, the legs, et cetera, and that makes sense to me.”

The flies do have options for getting over the southern U.S. border.

At the same time, the headwinds or the fronts around a hurricane, if you will, might be able to move the fly a little bit unnaturally, if you let me use that term. So, it’s not something that we just want to go, oh, never mind. We don’t need to worry about that. But I think it’s also something we just need to be real about. We’re much more worried about wildlife movement, people movement, and domestic animal movement as well.”