United States: Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officials have announced that an elk in southeast Montana has already tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) on Friday. This elk was initially found on private land in Hunting District 704, near the Custer National Forest.
This is only the fourth elk in the state to test positive for CWD since 2017. In October, another elk in Hunting District 322, in the Ruby Mountains east of Dillon, also tested positive. This was the first elk in the Ruby Mountains to be infected.
CWD is actually deadly disease that affects the brain which and is always fatal to the animals that get it.
FWP biologists said, the bull elk in southeast Montana was experiencing symptoms of the disease in middle of October and looked emaciated and exhausted. It was frequently present at a water tank for several days in order to let people ride horses and drive vehicles nearby. When it seemed that the elk developed neurological issues and couldn’t lift its head, the FWP officials put it down and took samples.
As reported by the dailymontanan.com, Chronic Wasting Disease is an illness that is found to impact members of the deer family, including elk , moose, mule deer, and white-tailed deer and is due to a misshapen prion protein. Neurological and Behavioral Manifestation as well as emaciation can be signs of M. americana infection in animals that show symptoms. Disease is fatal and incurable, and the death occurs in every case.
The disease persists in cervid populations in at least 24 states and two Canadian provinces; it initially infected Montana’s wild herds in 2017.
These calculations are based on the data that in Montana, the vast majority of cases, 99%, have been confirmed in white-tailed deer and mule deer, although some officials attribute this to sampling.
“My theory on why we’re just now seeing it in elk is simply because there are far fewer samples taken from elk,” said Mitchell. Because the whole deer carcass can be easily pulled out, it improves the chances of people having their deer sampled at the FWP sampling station.
However, elk are so much larger that hunters generally take only the quarters or the meat back into the field and thus are not generally tested. I think maybe we have so few elk in our sample that it is not that it is new on the landscape we just hadn’t sample it enough yet.”