A warm day didn’t stop deer from coming out for the opening weekend of the November firearms portion of deer season. To kick off the start of the season, the Missouri Department of Conservation hosted mandatory sampling to test for chronic wasting disease.
Chronic wasting disease is a neurological disease that is slow to take effect but spreads quickly between deer. The disease is transmitted from deer-to-deer contact, urine, feces and saliva, cervid program director Jason Isabelle said.
“As deer are out there on the landscape interacting with each other (and) grooming each other, the infectious proteins are in those bodily fluids, so (the deer) can exchange them,” Isabelle said.
When a hunter brings a deer to the sampling site, a recorder tracks the hunter’s permit and their hunting location. Then, a station sampler makes an incision into the deer’s neck and extracts its lymph nodes. The samples are sent to University of Missouri labs for testing.
Hunters are given a barcode to track which stage of testing their sample is in. If the test comes back positive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends not eating the deer and properly disposing of the meat and carcass parts. Results may take up to four weeks, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation’s website.
The department usually collects around 20,000 samples during the opening weekend, Isabelle said. Since July 1, four deer have tested positive for the disease in Missouri, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation’s website.
Across the entire state, less than 1% of samples test positive every year, Isabelle said. Within counties affected by the disease, less than 2% test positive, he added.
“We want to try to slow this spread as much as we can and to keep the percentage of the herd that has the disease as low as possible,” Isabelle said.
Once the percentage reaches about 5%, the infected population increases rapidly within a matter of years, he said.
Besides sampling, hunters can help stop the spread of the disease by hunting an extra deer or two in infested areas and having them sampled, Isabelle said. He said hunters should follow carcass disposal regulations and correct placement of feed and mineral for deer in management zone counties.
Boone County has mandatory sampling sites at Hallsville Primary School, the Missouri Department of Conservation Central Regional Office and the Ashland Optimist Club. The Missouri Department of Conservation will continue mandatory sampling on Sunday.
For more information on the disease in Missouri, visit the Department of Conservation’s website.
