Screwworm Watch draws on a small set of named sources. Factual claims in the dossier are tied to one of these, each with an “as of” date:

• ›USDA APHIS — the federal authority for New World screwworm status, detections, and the sterile-fly response.
• ›Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) — state-level detections, infested-zone designations, and movement orders.
• ›CDC — guidance on the (rare) risk of screwworm myiasis in people.
• ›COPEG — the U.S.–Panama commission operating the permanent sterile-fly barrier in the Darién Gap.
• ›News coverage via the Stovall Report pipeline — an RSS/feed ingest of reporting from wire services, national outlets, Texas local press, and agricultural trade press, surfaced in the Latest Updates feed and labelled by source type.

The complete sourcing record — including claims we deliberately left off the page because they could not be cleanly verified — is kept in SCREWWORM_SOURCES.md.

The Latest Updates news feed is automated: it refreshes hourly from the Stovall Report pipeline, and the page is also re-generated immediately whenever the pipeline finishes a run. The hand-authored material — the threat level, the map zones, the status dossier, the timeline, and this methodology — is reviewed editorially on a weekly basis, and sooner when a significant development warrants it. The last human review date is stamped at the bottom of this page and in the provenance block on the main page.

The threat-map zones are approximate and illustrative. They are not survey data, GPS-traced boundaries, or official quarantine maps. Each zone is drawn from the regions named in the sourced facts — for example, a confirmed-case marker sits at an approximate coordinate for the county named in the USDA/TAHC statement, and buffer and barrier areas are rough representations of the regions those agencies describe. Treat the map as an at-a-glance orientation aid, not a precise depiction of where the parasite is or is not present. For official quarantine and infested-zone boundaries, defer to TAHC and USDA APHIS.

In addition to the hand-verified dossier, the map pulls two live public ArcGIS layers each time the page regenerates: the Texas Animal Health Commission's NWS response-zone service (the layer behind TDEM's official state screwworm map — active Infested Zones are resolved to their counties using TAHC's county-boundary layer), and the New Mexico NWS positive-county layer. Counties added this way are labeled as coming from the live surveillance layer so they are never confused with individually sourced cases. The map header shows the health of each live layer; if a layer is unreachable, the map falls back to the verified dossier rather than showing nothing. (Until August 2026 the Texas layer came from a different publisher whose service was deleted — the map now reads TAHC's own service directly.)

We keep these two words distinct on purpose:

The field-report form lets anyone flag a suspected case. These submissions are unverified by default and are labelled “Public field report.” They are logged for editorial review and are not published as confirmed cases, plotted as confirmed markers, or added to the case count unless and until they are independently corroborated by an official source. Submitting the form is not a substitute for contacting your veterinarian, the TAHC, or the USDA Screwworm Hotline — for a suspected case, call them first.

• ›This is an independent tracker, not an official government source. Where we differ from USDA APHIS or TAHC, defer to them.
• ›Map zones are approximate and not to survey grade.
• ›The threat level is The Stovall Report's editorial assessment against a published rubric, not an official government alert level.
• ›The news feed depends on third-party publishing and source-name metadata; source-type tags are assigned by automated heuristic and may occasionally misclassify an outlet.
• ›Figures marked “≈” are approximate or illustrative.
• ›There can be a lag between an official detection and its appearance here, especially for the hand-reviewed sections.

Spotted an error? Email corrections@thestovallreport.com. We correct verified mistakes promptly.