The Screwworm Plan Exists Now. The Question Is Whether Your Clinic Has It.
If you run a spay/neuter clinic or a trap-neuter-vaccinate-return program, picture the cat you released yesterday. Fixed, vaccinated, left ear tipped, set back down where it came from. Two fresh wounds on an animal you will probably never get your hands on again. In most of the country that is a non-event. The cat heals up outside and gets on with its life. That is the whole model, and it works.
The New World screwworm is the thing that changes the math on that. It is a fly whose larvae eat living tissue. The female lays her eggs in an open wound on a warm-blooded animal and the maggots burrow into healthy flesh. Untreated, it can kill in days. It crossed into the United States in early June, confirmed in animals in Texas and New Mexico, including a dog. It is not in most states, and it is federally reportable. The wounds it hunts are scrapes, bites, surgical incisions, and ear tips, which is a precise description of a cat you just fixed and sent home.
A few weeks ago I would have told you nobody had written the plan for that. That is no longer true, and I want to give credit where it is due. Best Friends Animal Society has published a community-cat screwworm protocol, plus a full toolkit for shelters and rescues. The field stepped up, and faster than it usually does. If you do this work, go get it.
Here is the short version of what it says. While the cat is under for surgery, give a systemic medication that protects it for about a month, using a product authorized for cats, so the incision is covered while it heals. Close the incision tight so it is not oozing, because blood draws the flies. Ear tip with a cautery tool and clean edges, and make sure the tip and the incision are clotted and dry before the cat goes back out. In the worst hot spots during fly season, weigh holding cats a day or two. And one hard safety line: never put permethrin, the pyrethroids, or DEET on a cat, and never use livestock fly products, because all of those can kill a cat. None of this is exotic. It is ordinary wound care, sharpened, and switched on only where the fly is actually active.
So the plan exists. That should be the end of the story. It is not, and here is why.
A plan on a website is not the same as a plan in your clinic. The gap was never really that nobody knew what to do. The gap is whether the knowing reaches the doing in time. When the worm shows up in a county, every spay/neuter clinic and every cat program in it has two options. Either the protocol is already packed and ready, or they find out the hard way, by losing a cat and then scrambling. One of those is prevention. The other is the reaction this field runs every single time.
And not everyone is plugged into the right network to even see the new guidance. The clinic that needs this most is often the small rural one with no staff and no time to follow four organizations and their blogs. The plan reaching the well-connected orgs is not the same as the plan reaching the ones on the edge of the next outbreak.
That is the prevention work now. Not writing the playbook, that part is done. Getting it ready before it is needed, and getting it to everyone, including the people who will never see the announcement on their own. Have your protocol packed before the worm reaches your region. Make sure the clinic down the road has it too. The plan existing this early is prevention working. The plan sitting unread while the fly moves north is the same old failure wearing a new coat.
https://bestfriends.org/network/blog/screwworm-community-cats
We do preventive maintenance on our cars, our houses, and our own bodies. The screwworm is a chance to prove we can do it in animal welfare for once, ahead of the emergency instead of after it. The playbook is on the shelf. Take it down before you need it.
Join the shift to prevention.
Donate to Prevention and fund what happens before the shelter.
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