Deer hunters! We need you to help us in the battle against chronic wasting disease among our state’s white-tailed deer population!
Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, is a 100% fatal, transmissible, neurogenerative disease. The CDC recommends that deer infected with this disease should not be eaten. One challenge of detecting the disease is that until deer enter the last stages of CWD, they often appear completely healthy.
Hunters can help in efforts to control CWD by submitting harvested deer for testing, harvesting younger bucks, and discontinuing the use of supplemental feeding and baiting to help keep deer from congregating.
CWD is dangerously different from other diseases that affect deer.
“Other devastating diseases of deer have a disease cycle endpoint, such as the arrival of cold weather,” says Bronson Strickland, MSU Extension wildlife specialist. “That does not happen with CWD, as the disease slowly kills the individual deer and takes time to move through the area’s population.”
CWD was first identified in Colorado in 1967, and it spread throughout the West. It was first seen east of the Mississippi River in Wisconsin in 2002.
The Mississippi Wildlife, Fisheries, & Parks Foundation, which regulates wildlife and hunting in Mississippi, began looking for CWD among the state’s deer at that time. The first positive in the state was detected in February 2018 in Issaquena County.
Since then, there have been 134 CWD-positive deer reported in the state in nine counties: Issaquena (2), Pontotoc (1), Marshall (35), Benton (87), Panola (1), Tallahatchie (1), Tippah (2), Alcorn (3) and Warren (2).
Hunters can leave the heads of harvested deer at one of our state’s 63 drop-off sites. Agency officials collect the heads weekly, test them for CWD and provide the results at no cost to the hunters.
MORE INFO: http://ow.ly/aE3J50KL1L8
Original source can be found here.
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