Pa. expands deer CWD disease area
(Harrisburg) — Six deer killed on Pennsylvania highways tested positive for chronic wasting disease in 2014 and so far this year.
Pennsylvania Game Commission on Tuesday announced the additional information for Disease Management Area 2, which was expanded to include part of Somerset County.
DMA 2 is only area of the state where CWD has been detected in free-ranging deer. It includes parts of Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Huntington, Fulton and Somerset counties.
None of the samples collected from deer or elk harvested by hunters anywhere in the state during the 2014-15 hunting seasons tested positive for CWD. No road-killed deer or elk from outside DMA 2 tested positive.
No new cases have been detected in captive deer or elk outside a DMA.
The boundary of DMA 2 was expanded because CWD-positive deer were detected within DMA 2 or in Maryland were near previous boundaries. Pennsylvania’s CWD Response Plan requires a 10-mile buffer around sites associated with positive tests.
CWD is not known to afflict humans, but is always fatal to the deer and elk it infects.
The Game Commission sampled 4,266 deer statewide during 2014. Of these, 1,701 were from DMAs.
DMA 1 (York and Adams counties) accounted for 520 samples, 938 samples came from DMA 2, and there were 243 samples from DMA 3 (Clearfield, Indiana and Jefferson counties).
Additionally, the Game Commission sampled 89 elk for CWD in 2014, and no positives were detected.
In Pennsylvania, monitoring for CWD continues year-round and since the start of 2015, 253 additional samples have been collected. One of these tested positive, and is counted among the six additional positives within DMA 2.
The six additional CWD-positive deer brings the total to 11 free-ranging CWD-positive deer detected in Pennsylvania. All of these have been within DMA 2.
Overall, the proportion of deer to test positive remains small.
Since 1998, the Game Commission has collected and submitted more than 52,000 wild deer and elk for CWD testing, with a total of 11 positive tests.
While most of the six additional CWD cases were centralized within DMA 2, two of the positive deer came from sites near what had been DMA 2’s western boundary. One deer, an 18-month-old male buck, was struck and killed by a vehicle on U.S. 220 in November in Bedford County. The other, a 30-month-old doe, was killed in March on state Pa. 56, in Bedford County.
The Game Commission in the 2015-16 license year again will issue special permits for taking antlerless deer in DMA 2 to increase the doe harvest by one deer per square mile in the DMA.
For more information visit www.pgc.state.pa.us.
This article comes to us through a partnership between Public Opinion Online and WITF.
A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.
