February 10, 2009
Columbus, Ohio - For the seventh straight year, testing of Ohio's
deer herd has found no evidence of chronic wasting disease (CWD), a
degenerative brain disease that affects elk, mule deer and white-tailed
deer.
According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of
Wildlife, state and federal agriculture and wildlife officials collected
1,021 samples last year from hunter-harvested deer, primarily during the
deer-gun season that ran December 1-7. All CWD testing is performed at the
Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory of the Ohio Department of Agriculture
(ODA).
In addition to CWD, 966 samples, or 94.6 percent of the hunter-harvested
deer samples were also tested for bovine tuberculosis. Results found no
evidence of this disease in Ohio deer.
Additional CWD samples are being taken from road-killed deer, but those
test results are not yet available.
Since 2002, the Division of Wildlife, in conjunction with the ODA's
Division of Animal Industry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Service, has been conducting surveillance
throughout the state for CWD, as well as epizootic hemorrhagic disease and
bovine tuberculosis. While CWD has never been found in Ohio's deer herd, it
had been diagnosed in wild and captive deer, moose or elk in 15 other
states and two Canadian provinces. Since CWD was discovered in the western
United States in the late 1960s, there has been no evidence that the
disease can be transmitted to humans.
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