Meeting to update public on chronic wasting disease

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission will hold a meeting concerning chronic wasting disease at the Carroll Electric Cooperative Building at 6 p.m. March 14 in Jasper.

It’s been a year since the first case of the disease was discovered in Arkansas.

“When we went to the people of Jasper back in March last year, we promised them we would keep them informed as we worked to identify the disease’s spread and impact in the state,” said Cory Gray, manager of the commission’s Research, Evaluation and Compliance Division.

“This meeting will let us update everyone about what we’ve learned and what steps we are looking at to continue battling the spread of this disease.”

The disease has been found in 206 white- tailed deer and six elk. The most recent positive cases were deer taken to taxidermists. Twenty-eight positive cases have come from 898 samples submitted, Gray said.

“Those samples don’t really contribute scientifically in determining prevalence in the state, as mounted animals are biased toward your older bucks, which are the highest risk for having CWD,” Gray said.

All positive cases came from counties already in the disease management zone, he said.

Another positive case came from 29 samples collected through veterinarians, and three cases came from samples taken from the Missouri Department of Conservation on deer harvested in Arkansas.

Gray said biologists won’t take random samples from the Jasper area outside of hunting season, but they plan to conduct selective sampling near Arkansas Nuclear One, where hunting is prohibited, in the immediate vicinity of the southernmost positive case, which was found in Pope County.

“We also plan to continue taking samples from sick deer and elk reported by the public as well as road-killed deer,” Gray said. “We will resume collecting road-killed deer reported by the public from Feb. 20-April 1, and again from Sept. 18-Nov. 1. These windows were determined last year to be the best times when deer movement was high and temperatures allowed collection of viable samples.”