No new CWD cases found during AGFC, U.S. Fish and Wildlife testing
No new positive cases of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) were found during a surveillance sampling of the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge and Lower Ouachita Beryl Anthony Wildlife Management Area in February, said Cory Gray, chief researcher for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
“Everything was negative. We had 40 samples in Felsenthal and then three in Lower Ouachita Beryl Anthony, and they all came back negative,” he said.
From Feb. 7-11, the AGFC and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services teamed up to search for additional cases of CWD in south Arkansas following the detection of a case in a doe at the Felsenthal NWR earlier this winter. Gray explained previously that the USFWS planned to try to collect 40-50 deer samples at the NWR while the AGFC aimed to bag 15 deer at the WMA to be tested for CWD.
The deer were to be screened in Little Rock for the disease, and if any screenings turned up positive, they would have been sent for a confirmation test at a lab in Madison, Wisconsin.
“This is good news, that we’ve not found the disease any more, so what disease is there, we believe, is going to be a very small prevalence rate,” Gray said.
All the deer that were harvested during the surveillance sampling have been donated to Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry to be donated to a food
pantry in Ashley County, Gray said. In total, 1,144 pounds of venison was donated.
Gray said that the processor who held the deer while they were being tested was based in Crossett, and that Hunters Feeding the Hungry, a nonprofit, partnered with the AGFC to pay the costs of processing.
“We didn’t want the processor to be out of any money for that,” he said.
Bow season remained open through Feb. 28, and Gray said local hunters agreed to continue testing any deer they harvested before the end of the season.
“We’ve still got some private landowners in Felsenthal sampling the deer,” he said. “We have some hunting clubs out there that we’ve asked to continue to sample and they’re going to continue through hunting season.”
Now, the AGFC’s regulation cycle has started, and staff there are starting to determine whether south Arkansas will see any changes to deer hunting rules during the next hunting season. In northwest Arkansas, where the prevalence of CWD is much higher than it is locally, a two-tiered management zone has been established, limiting the movement of deer carcasses to prevent the disease’s continued transmission.
“We’ve still got a lot of time to decide what regulations will go into effect down there, and they won’t go into effect until July 1. There’ll be a public comment period; that’ll be mainly through April,” Gray said. “A lot of time remains before anything is finalized.”
The case found in Union County late last year was the first CWD case to be detected in south Arkansas; it was found more than 120 miles from the nearest positive case previously detected (Issaquena County, Mississippi) and more than 200 miles from the nearest known positive case of CWD in Arkansas.
CWD is a prion disease. Diseased prions cause normal cellular proteins to misfold into abnormal shapes, which accumulate until neural cells cease to function.
CWD is transmitted between animals through urine, feces and saliva. Deer that contract CWD are known to lose weight, lose their appetite and develop an insatiable thirst; they may also separate from their herds, walk in repetitive patterns, carry their head low, salivate, urinate frequently and grind their teeth.
Prions can survive for years in soil and plants. CWD can have an incubation period of at least 16 months, which means infected animals may not show immediate signs of disease. CWD prions accumulate throughout the body and affect an animal’s nervous system.
Gray said additional surveillance sampling events aren’t planned currently, though he did encourage any local hunters who harvest deer this week before hunting season ends to have them tested for the disease.
Hunters who wish to have their deer tested for CWD can take the head of the deer, with 6 inches of neck still attached, to one of the AGFC’s network of participating taxidermists to have a sample tested for free, or drop it at one of the CWDtesting collection stations located throughout the state.
The Union County Sheriff’s Office, 250 American Rd. in El Dorado, has a CWD-testing collection box available to drop deer off at.
A list of CWD-testing facilities is available at www.agfc.com/ cwd.
Gray said that the detection of the first case and subsequent surveillance are evidence that the AGFC’s CWD monitoring plan is working.
“It’s a good thing we found this very early. That’s exactly what our surveillance plan is for; it’s designed to find the disease. So on a good note, it worked; it did exactly what it was designed to do,” he said. “We found it, and now we can address it and hopefully we can keep the prevalence down. We don’t want CWD at the same prevalence in south Arkansas that it is in north Arkansas. Hopefully it won’t grow.”
Editor’s note: A version of this story previously appeared in the Feb. 24 edition of the News-Times.