Texas authorities expand fever tick quarantine area

Austin, Texas

- A year after establishing its first 39,325-acre quarantine to fight fever ticks, the Texas Animal Health Commission expanded its watch zone by another 307,000 acres.

The increased quarantine is in response to the discovery of fever ticks on cattle outside Starr and Zapata counties, where the ticks first were detected.

The ticks can transit the fatal "tick fever" to cattle, according to the TAHC, and have been found on livestock or wildlife on 139 Texas pastures during the last year. The Department of Agriculture's Tick Force and the TAHC are trying to contain them in the quarantine area.

"This is no longer a 'border war' against the fever tick," says Dr. Bob Hillman, head of the TAHC and Texas' state veterinarian. "The fever tick has gained a substantial foothold on Texas soil, and, without adequate resources to fight this pest, it will spread."

The National Fever Tick Eradication Strategic Plan, developed and approved by the USDA in 2006, called for strict monitoring of cattle and working with Mexico, where fever ticks are not controlled, to keep the pest at bay. But that plan never was implemented, Hillman says, and the federal government awarded Texas only $5.2 million of the $13 million it requested to fight the outbreak.

The tick, which can survive coast to coast, even through winter conditions, was pushed back into Mexico in 1943, according to the TAHC. Occasionally, ticks have been found in Texas since then, but an outbreak of this size hasn't occurred since the 1970s. That outbreak took six years to eradicate, the TAHC says.

Preventative quarantine areas in Texas now include more than a million acres in Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Maverick, Dimmit and Webb counties, plus a half-million acres of permanent quarantine zones along the Rio Grande River from Del Rio to Brownsville.

A map of the quarantined areas can be found here.