By Jose Torres and Cassandra Garrison
METAPA DE DOMINGUEZ, Mexico, Oct 15 (Reuters) - A rotten smell hanging over a town in Mexico's southern Chiapas state drove residents into the streets on Thursday to demand the removal of a sterile-fly plant at the center of the US-Mexican fight against the flesh-eating New World screwworm parasite.
Residents in Metapa de Dominguez compared the odor to rotting meat and spoiled food, describing it as “pungent in your nose and mouth” and causing nausea. The smell, once concentrated around the plant, could now be detected farther away, particularly when winds carried it across the town, protesters said. The odor had reached schools near the plant and disrupted classes.
"We don't care about the investment they made. What we want is for this plant to leave here, because the smell coming over the town is too much," said truck driver Mercedes Becerra de la Cruz.
The complaints come less than four months after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins inaugurated the facility on June 27. The US Department of Agriculture invested $21 million toward the $51 million facility, part of a broader effort to halt a screwworm outbreak that disrupted the cross-border cattle trade.
Sterile flies are the main defense against screwworm, a parasite whose larvae burrow into the living flesh of cattle and other warm-blooded animals and can kill them if untreated.
Eradicated from the US decades ago, the pest has surged north from Central America through Mexico, prompting Washington to impose a more than year-long ban on Mexican cattle imports. The Metapa plant is expected eventually to produce 100 million sterile flies a week.
Mexico has recorded nearly 48,000 cases of screwworm in the current outbreak and the United States 53.
Inside the Metapa plant, millions of flies are bred each week, their larvae fed a carefully formulated mixture of egg, milk and powdered hemoglobin that mimics the nutrient-rich conditions of a wound. The flies are sterilized before being released by the millions to mate with wild females without producing offspring, gradually suppressing the population.
Outside its walls, residents said daily life has increasingly been shaped by an overpowering odor that drifts into surrounding neighborhoods and schools.
"We need the federal government to respond and have the plant relocated. It is far too close, right in the middle of the town," said 49-year-old homemaker Rosalba Merida Herrera. "For the sake of our children and our elderly, we are asking them to look at the situation, as this issue is now affecting the entire town."
A spokesperson for Mexico's Agriculture Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Jose Torres in Metapa de Dominguez and Cassandra Garrison in Mexico City, Editing by Bill Berkrot)
