Washington Post The New World screwworm in Mexico has prompted an almost year-long blockade on imported cattle and disrupted domestic feedlots and long-standing business relationships. Juan Manuel Fleischer’s ancestors ranched on the borderlands before the United States existed, and the Arizona resident’s business importing Mexican cattle across the modern-day frontier has survived decades of immigration politics and the construction of a towering steel wall.
But that work has collapsed over the past year as an insidious threat shakes U.S.-Mexico relations and the American beef industry: the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite that has resurged south of the border 60 years after it was mostly eradicated in U.S. livestock.