The USDA's choice of the word 'detected' for a flesh-eating screwworm in South Texas is classic damage-control poetry. It turns an invasive parasite's first potential crossing of the US-Mexico border into something that sounds like they caught a typo in a spreadsheet rather than a fly whose larvae eat living tissue.
Reality offers no such comfort. Once these worms establish in livestock or wildlife, containment requires years of sterile-male releases and border monitoring that suddenly gets expensive. Calling it an 'infection detected' lets everyone pretend the situation is still administrative instead of biological. The parasite does not read press releases.
