Tyrone, PA- CWD. Chronic Wasting Disease. Have you heard of it? Probably not, but it is a serious issue for local hunters and deer farmers.
CWD is a malfunction of a deer’s brain. If a breakout of CWD occurs locally, deer farmers will be affected greatly and other states will not allow deer to travel from our state to theirs, which would seriously affect the local deer farming business.
Deer farmers must be able to sell their deer to preserves to make money. Josh Newton, on the board of the Pennsylvania Deer Farms Association, said, “The symptoms of CWD are weight loss, drooling, and loss of balance.” Other diseases like this are Mad Cow and Scurvy.
The first recorded case of CWD was in1967. CWD doesn’t affect humans. People have eaten infected meat and have not contracted the disease.
According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, in 2012 hunter killed deer from Bedford and Blair counties tested positive for CWD. They were the first cases of CWD in Pennsylvania since the commission began testing for the disease in 1998.
According to James Decker, a local deer farmer, at this point we shouldn’t be too worried about CWD. He said “three known cases of CWD were found recently. These were wild deer in Blair and Bedford County.”
He also said, “No scientific proof exists as to where CWD originated.”
Decker also said “It can take up to 10 years for CWD to show up in a whitetail deer considering the average life span of a whitetail deer in PA is 3 to 5 years”
Decker currently owns 30 deer and hasn’t experience this problem. But he has a friend who has experienced this problem. When this happens, the state comes in and eliminates all of the deer in the herd and tests them for CWD.
Deer farmers test regularly for CWD, but not many cases have been found.
