Province monitoring deer population for CW D

Hunters asked to submit heads of harvested deer to be tested for chronic wasting disease

The Alberta government’s environment department is asking hunters across southern Alberta for their help in tracking a disease that is plaguing the deer population and continues to spread throughout the province.

The department is asking hunters to submit their deer heads and the geographic location that the deer was hunted into the CWD surveillance program, so they can be tested for chronic wasting disease (CWD).

“We’ve been running this hunter program since 1998, so it’s not something new,” says Margo Pybus, one of Alberta’s Wildlife Disease Specialists.

“However, generally speaking, it is new to Alberta. It was probably accidentally introduced in Saskatchewan in the 1980s and what we’re seeing in Alberta is it spreading across the border. We actually didn’t find a case in the province until 2005 which was 12 years into the study. However, since then we’ve seen a steady increase in CWD now in Alberta.”

Chronic wasting disease, which affects members of the deer family including mule deer, white-tailed deer and elk, is a fatal illness that affects the proteins in their lymph nodes and brains before eventually killing them.

However, CWD is not native to Alberta, but as the species follow the river banks, the disease has slowly spilled into the eastern part of the province and is heading south and north over time, prompting officials to widen their reach to hunters and ask them to co-operate in the surveillance program. With the rapid growth of the disease the government is making it mandatory for hunters to submit their deer heads for CWD testing in eastern Alberta from Cold Lake south to the U.S. border.

“The deer head testing program is really helping us document what’s happening, and can show better the increased rate of how it’s spreading further west,” says Pybus. “Basically, there’s a corridor from Medicine Hat that the deer have travelled on and have come straight up from the south of the Saskatchewan border and into Alberta. The deer have since followed the river valleys further across the province (since they are the best deer habitat) and that is mainly where the transmission occurs.”

Although it is not known how exactly the disease is passed from species to species, Pybus says there are several methods that scientists believe are the main methods of infection.

“In wild populations, we don’t exactly know how it’s spread but direct contact is definitely the primary problem, whether it’s through body where infected animals directly pass it on to another or through infectious materials that could be shed onto the ground and picked up by other animals.”

However, even with the knowledge of how more and more deer are becoming infected with CWD, Pybus says controlling or treating the illness is not an easy or even viable task.

“It’s very difficult to stop. What we’re trying to do is target CWD, look at pattern disease data, and we’re also trying to focus hunter harvest on mule deer where it’s more prominent and manipulate the harvest there, so hunters can kill those deer and remove those infected ones before they transmit.”

Pybus adds that manipulating the harvest and asking hunters to focus mainly on the areas where the disease is mostly prevalent would be the only control the government has of CWD as there’s no treatment or vaccine available to cure the illness.

Pybus says although health authorities have stated they cannot find any evidence of CWD infecting people, they do recommend people do not eat the animals that test positive for CWD and suggest all hunters submit their deer heads for testing before consuming their meat.

The 2017 CWD surveillance program which is underway asks hunters to submit their harvested deer heads which should remain frozen until dropped off at the closest Fish and Wildlife office during regular business hours.