May 14, 2016 3 min read

Uh, oh.

Testing from last deer season showed an additional 12 white-tailed deer in Disease Management Area 2 in southcentral Pennsylvania were positive for chronic wasting disease.

That’s not good news on any level.

While DMA 2 is the only area of the state that had positive tests for CWD – thanks to some infected animals that escaped from a deer farm in 2012 – the latest cases bring the total free-ranging deer in DMA 2 to 22.

The new cases resulted in the Pennsylvania Game Commission expanding DMA 2 by 437 square miles. DMA 2 includes nearly all of Bedford County along with parts of Fulton, Cambria, Huntingdon and Blair counties.

In other words, the only thing separating our area from CWD is Fayette and Westmoreland counties. And that range is expanding each year.

A map showing the latest expansion to DMA 2 was posted online at www.pgc.pa.gov and will be included in the 2016-17 Pennsylvania Hunting & Trapping Digest that’s issued to hunters at the time they buy licenses.

Special rules regarding hunting, transport and feeding of wild deer apply within all DMAs, and are detailed in full online.

All deer harvested in DMAs – there are three in the state – are tested for CWD and in the newest cases found, one of the afflicted deer was harvested by a hunter.

The hunter in the case transported a buck that later tested positive from DMA 2 to a deer processor far outside of the DMA, and the high-risk parts went to a rendering plant. Transporting a deer out of the DMA is illegal.

CWD, which was first detected in Colorado deer and elk in 1967, is a member of the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy family of diseases that includes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or Mad Cow Disease in cattle, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and Scrapie in sheep and goats.

The specific cause of CWD is believed to be an abnormal protein infectious particle that is found in the brain, the nervous system and some lymphoid tissues of infected animals. It causes death of brain cells and, on a microscopic level, holes in the brain tissue.

It has been diagnosed in white-tailed deer, mule deer, black-tailed deer, including hybrids, as well as elk, red deer and moose. There is no evidence CWD is transmissible to humans or traditional livestock but it is not recommended animals infected with the disease be consumed by humans.

The disease slowly spread across the country since first being identified, but once it gets a foothold in the wild population, it can spread quickly. It is now found in 23 states and two Candadian provinces.

According to Pennsylvania Game Commisison, in some areas of Wyoming and Wisconsin, more than 40 percent of deer and elk tested were positive for CWD. Arkansas first reported a CWD-positive elk on Feb. 23. Follow-up sampling since then found an additional 81 positive animals, and 23 percent of the deer and elk samples from the infected area of northern Arkansas tested positive.

“This is the one disease that has the potential to drastically change deer hunting as we know it,” said Game Commission Wildlife Management Director Wayne Laroche.

Statewide, the commission tested 5,645 road-killed, hunter-harvested and suspected infected deer in 2015.

Outdoors editor F. Dale Lolley can be reached at dlolley@observer-reporter.com.