Plan for Assisting States, Federal Agencies and Tribes in Managing Chronic Wasting Disease in Wild and Captive Cervids

摘要

In the late 1960s, a clinical syndrome seen in captive mule deer came to be known as chronic wasting disease (CWD). This syndrome was identified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) in 1978. In the early 1980s, CWD was identified in free-ranging deer and elk in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. In May 2001, CWD was confirmed in a free-ranging mule deer that had been harvested in November 2000 in the southwestern corner of Nebraska adjacent to Colorado and Wyoming. In this so-called endemic area of some 20,000 square miles, infection rates range from more than 10 percent of white-tailed and mule deer in the most infected areas to 1 percent or less of all elk in the endemic area. CWD has also been diagnosed in farmed elk herds. The first report of a farmed elk with CWD came from Saskatchewan in 1996, and in 1997 another case was identified on a South Dakota elk farm. Since that time, additional positive farmed elk herds have been found in South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Montana, Kansas, and Alberta (most of these herds have been depopulated).