Cattle Raisers urge Congress to keep fighting fever ticks
 
FORT WORTH, Texas, June 6, 2007—TSCRA members voiced their support for USDA's National Strategic Plan for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program (CFTEP) at their 2007 summer meeting June 2 in Fredericksburg.

Left uncontrolled, the ticks could spread tick fever throughout the nation's cow herd, resulting in losses of $1 billion a year to the beef industry and driving up the cost of beef for consumers.

In this centennial year of the CFTEP, cattle raisers urged Congress to appropriate funding for the program at levels of $10 million the first year, decreasing to $7.1 million by FY 2011.

TSCRA members also urged Congress to appropriate $2.5 million per year to USDA Agricultural Research Service to find and develop new acaracides for fever tick control on "wildlife hosts and on livestock, and to identify mitigation strategies that could aid in control of fever ticks."

Dr. John George, USDA-ARS Knipling-Bushland U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory, Kerrville, spoke to the joint TSCRA Animal Health and Agricultural Research Committee meeting.

"Two factors are of immediate interest to the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program," George explained. "One, tickicide-resistant ticks and, two, wildlife as hosts."

Three acaracides, or tickicides, are regulated for use in the U.S.—organophosphates, pyrethroids and amytraz. A small population of ticks has developed a resistance to each of these pesticides in Mexico, George explained, adding, "there is some resistance to ivermectin."

The six to seven outbreaks of acaracide-resistant ticks are disturbing, but so is the expense—$20 million to $40 million to develop new drugs and acaracides for a relatively small market.

At the inception of the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program 100 years ago, unregulated hunting and screwworms had greatly reduced South Texas wildlife populations. Deer were not considered hosts for the ticks when the program began receiving funding in 1907.

"Evidence suggests this is no longer true," George said. "Tick infested white-tailed deer and exotic ungulate wildlife species are abundant in South Texas. We may have population of cattle fever ticks being sustained by white-tailed deer.

Only two ways have been found to treat white-tailed deer for cattle fever tick infestations, and neither is considered foolproof—ivermectin-medicated feed and a four-poster, a feeder with four acaracide soaked posts against which the deer must rub to reach the feed.

"Both these treatments have been developed by our lab at Kerrville and neither is a silver bullet. In the short term, these treatments can be expensive," he said.

Other problems face the CFTEP—many relatively small-acreage premises; mediocre fence quality; many absentee landowners; dense population of white-tailed deer; hunter interference with ivermectin-medicated corn and four-posters.

"There is a need for changes in the eradication program regulations, and we have to consider the rights of landowners in all this," George said.  "We really need to know the extent of (the role of) white-tailed deer in the maintenance and dispersal of fever ticks. We need better tools, methods and technology, and we need to cooperate with Mexico to eradicate ticks in northern Mexico," particularly in the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Coahuila.

The ranchers in the 500-mile narrow buffer zone from Val Verde to Cameron County, are "defending the rest of Texas and the other states from which ticks were eradicated," said George.

A USDA Bureau of Animal Industry map from 1923, shows fever ticks once extended across the southeastern United.States from the Atlantic coast around to the Gulf Coast, into Kentucky, across the bottom of Missouri and Kansas, into Oklahoma and southwest across Texas down to the coast. The southern counties of California, down the Baja peninsula, were also infested.

Thanks to the vigilance of cattle raisers in the 500-mile quarantine zone, which ranges from .4 to 16 kilometers wide in places, cattle fever ticks have not crept back into their traditional range. However, the shift in the wildlife population of South Texas has caused an increase in infested premises in Zapata County outside the quarantine zone.

George said, "Warmer winters will affect the population and survival of ticks. Warmer average temperatures throughout the southern part of the U.S. would allow the ticks to spread their range."

It's a problem with staggering implications for the entire for the entire U.S. beef industry. Eradication is not easy; although a single treatment kills all the ticks on an animal, it will not assure eradication because it does not prevent reinfestation.

"Only a long-range program can rid an area of ticks," emphasizes USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. For this reason, APHIS dips every animal in an infested or exposed herd at regular intervals for at least one year following direct or presumed contact with the pest.

Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association is a 130-year-old trade organization whose 14,800 members manage approximately 3.7 million cattle on 96.5 million acres of range and pasture land, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma.

TSCRA-16-2007