Chronic wasting disease hit Wis. hard, Minn. trying to avoid the same fate
Published 7:26 am Monday, November 5, 2018
- Doug Duren is a hunter and landowner in the driftless area of Wisconsin. He hopes to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease by providing plastic-lined dumpsters to dispose of deer bones. If left on the land, infected bones and guts can spread the disease for years. John Enger/MPR News
By John Enger
MPR News/90.1 FM
It’s been two years since chronic wasting disease was found in the wild deer herds of southeast Minnesota.
There’s no cure for the brain disease and no vaccine. The life expectancy of a CWD-positive deer is about two years.
The good news is, it’s still early in Minnesota. Only 20 wild deer have tested positive.
But here’s the bad news: it’s hard to predict how the disease will spread in the state. And as deer hunting season gets underway this weekend, that’s troubling environmental officials, who fear the fatal disease might be on the cusp of exploding in Minnesota — which could cripple what is a billion-dollar industry in the state. Hunters often don’t want to shoot, or eat sick deer. If the disease spreads, that means fewer hunting licenses sold, and less funding for conservation.
This is a crisis Wisconsin knows well. What started as a fairly localized outbreak near Madison 16 years ago has spread across the lower third of the state. In certain areas, half the deer have CWD.
“We now have evidence that when CWD is there long enough, it impacts at the population level,” said Bryan Richards, the emerging disease coordinator for the wildlife division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Madison.
CWD-infected deer die young. Richards estimates they have only one fawn, instead of six, so the disease will eventually shrink the herd. Richards said it’s probably happening already.
“We know this occurs,” he said. “We know what the likely outcome of disease is.”
This is what Minnesota can expect, he said, if something dramatic isn’t done.
What went wrong in Wisconsin
Chronic wasting is a fatal brain disease to deer, elk and moose but is not known to affect human health.
In non-scientific terms, the animal’s brain becomes like Swiss cheese. Within just a few years, a once healthy deer becomes skinny and confused, wandering around with strings of infectious drool running from its mouth.
Infected deer will likely die within two years. They are highly contagious while still alive, and research shows infected carcasses and gut piles left behind by hunters can leave infectious traces on plants which can contaminate other deer years later.
