More cases of chronic wasting disease confirmed in Eastern Washington according to this article in The Chronicle:
Posted Saturday, December 21, 2024 11:33 am
Michael Wright / The Spokesman-Review (TNS)
More cases of chronic wasting disease have been found in northeast Washington, including one outside the hunting unit where the disease was first found.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Thursday that samples from four white-tailed deer killed by hunters tested positive for the disease.
Three of the animals were killed in game management unit 124 in northern Spokane County, the same unit where the disease was found for the first time this summer.
The fourth was killed in unit 117 near Davis Lake in Pende Oreille County, a find that expands the area where WDFW knows the disease is present.
Washington has found CWD in six animals since this summer, all but the first coming from hunter-submitted samples, and it's possible more positive test results are coming.
Donny Martorello, WDFW's science division chief, said in a news release that since some hunting seasons ended Sunday, there are still "several samples awaiting testing at the lab from the areas where these recent cases were confirmed."
CWD has been found in 35 states and five Canadian provinces. It attacks animals' nervous systems and kills them slowly over time. Animals in the late stages of the disease can appear emaciated and display erratic behavior.
It is not known to infect humans, but health officials advise against eating meat from infected animals.
Washington found its first case of the disease this summer in the Fairwood area of north Spokane. That prompted a suite of new rules for hunters and others aimed at limiting the spread and learning more about the scope of the outbreak.
Among the rules was mandatory CWD testing for hunter-killed animals in the three game management units closest to where the initial case was found — 124, 127 and 130.
Of those three, only 124 has produced positive samples . Each of the five cases found in the unit were within 5 miles of each other, generally in the Fairwood area of north Spokane.
The positive hit in Unit 117 is northeast of that area. Known as the 49 Degrees North unit, 117 covers a broad swath of territory between U.S. Highway 395 and the Pend Oreille River from Deer Park north. Davis Lake is on the east side of the unit, just off State Route 211.
Melia DeVivo, a WDFW ungulate research scientist, said the sample that tested positive was one of 131 that had been gathered from that unit. She added that the detection shows that the disease is more widespread than officials thought, but that it's not necessarily a big surprise.
"It's still not in the grand scheme of things that far from where we've already detected CWD," she said. "These animals do walk around."
Discussions of the CWD rules for next year will begin in January. DeVivo said the additional positive case will make them think differently about where they want to focus sample collection, and that it's likely that mandatory testing will be ordered there.
https://www.chronline.com/stories/more-cases-of-chronic-wasting-disease-confirmed-in-eastern-washington,370889?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR04hBD7b3MH-kjzZ1Lj5Jgwstb3W_Jwmcvh148JHaZd9o21_JHL6QaqPCA_aem_GuwhZMnEJcLOdXnmfRyJ1g
