Friday, January 22, 2010
Chronic wasting disease found in Virginia whitetail
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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A Virginia whitetail deer has tested positive for chronic wasting disease.
Department of Game and Inland Fisheries Virginia officials have confirmed that a deer killed in November in Frederick County had CWD, an insidious neurological disease that is always fatal.
The discovery was not surprising.
More than five dozen whitetails in West Virginia's Hampshire County, just across the state border, have tested positive for CWD since 2005.
Virginia joins 17 other states and Canadian provinces that have confirmed the presence of CWD, a slow-progressing disease that affects members of cervid family, including deer, elk and moose.
There is no evidence that CWD can be transmitted to livestock, or affect humans.
Virginia officials have tested more than 5,000 whitetails in the state since 2002, and ramped up testing after CWD was confirmed in Hampshire County.
Testing efforts have been particularly intense in Frederick and Shenandoah counties, an area the DGIF considers its Active Surveillance Zone.
More than 200 deer from the area were tested this fall, and the state is awaiting results on several dozen more samples.
West Virginia officials have confirmed CWD in 62 deer, out of more than 10,000 tested.
Some of the afflicted whitetails were killed within a 5 miles of the Virginia border.
This past season, 16 hunter-killed deer in Hampshire County tested positive for CWD.
Despite the proximity, Virginia game officials remained hopeful that the disease would not cross the border.
"You never know what can happen," said Cale Godfrey, an assistant director in the DGIF's Wildlife Division.
Virginia game officials have taken a number of steps to try to keep CWD out of the state.
They include restrictions on importing and moving live cervids into and within the state, prohibiting high-fenced deer enclosures, and special regulations on importing carcasses of hunter-killed deer and elk from states with CWD.
Godfrey said it is difficult to speculate on the potential long-term impact of the CWD in Virginia because environmental factors are so much different than in the West, where CWD has been known to exist since at least the 1960s.
He said there is a potential that the disease can have a major impact on deer populations.
Some states where CWD has been found recently in whitetails have experienced an initial drop in hunting pressure because hunters were uneasy about the disease, but hunting pressure has tended to rebound.
West Virginia hunters killed more than 3,700 deer in Hampshire County this past fall.
Godfrey said the DGIF is following steps outlined in a CWD response plan developed in 2002 after the disease was found in whitetails east of the Mississippi.
Officials are now trying to determine how many tested and CWD-positive deer have come from within a 5-mile radius of the origin of the positive Virginia deer, a 2-year-old doe killed by a hunter on Nov. 14.
Because the doe was killed less than a mile from the West Virginia border, part of that circle falls within that state.
Because of that factor, testing data from that state also must be considered.
Analyzing the data will help determine the extent of the outbreak, Godfrey said, after which Virginia officials can determine the next course of action.
He didn't speculate about what that course could be.
Because deer-to-deer contact is one way CWD spreads, some states with CWD have tried to reduce deer density in affected areas.
Methods include liberalizing regulations to encourage hunters to kill more deer, as well as using sharpshooters to thin herds .
