Recently, officials discovered chronic wasting disease or CWD in a deer in Bexar County. The deer was in the city of Hollywood Park. The first case of CWD in Texas was discovered in 2012 and free ranging mule deer in an isolated area of far West Texas and since then has spread slowly across the state.
TPR's Jerry Clayton spoke with Matt Reidy, a wildlife biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department about the discovery of the first case of CWD in Bexar County.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for time and clarity
Clayton: Can you give us a brief overview of CWD?
Reidy: CWD is chronic wasting disease. It's a contagious neurological disease of white tailed deer, mule deer and other deer species. The agent that causes the disease is a misfolded protein called a prion. It's a slow acting disease that causes steady neurological decline and death in infected deer.
Clayton: So are you surprised that in a place like Hollywood Park, we've discovered chronic wasting disease, a place where, by the way, there's a high urban deer population?
Reidy: I don't want to say surprised. You know, anytime we find the disease, we're disappointed to find it in new places or different places. We're continuing to learn more and more about the disease as time goes on and trying to kind of still understand how this disease is getting to different places.
Clayton: What is the possibility of humans contracting CWD as far as we know?
Reidy: Currently there is no evidence of people being able to get the disease. There's never been a documented case or anything like that. But recent research has shown there's potential for that to happen in the future. There's just no evidence at this point.
Clayton: So what can people do living in an urban area do to help mitigate CWD?
Reidy: Well, the first thing is education, learning about the disease, what it is, what it's about, what it does. And then the second thing is to really just kind of pay attention to what's going on in their surroundings. One of our big recommendations is, number one, don't feed the deer. Don't try to come in contact with the deer. You know, treat them as wild animals, as wildlife, appreciate them from afar, but try not to come into contact with them.
And then after that, definitely we're trying to educate the public about how the disease progresses in animals and then giving us giving us notice, calling a local game warden or a local biologist like myself if you do happen to see a deer that's exhibiting the signs of chronic wasting disease.
Clayton: And what would those signs be?
Reidy: I'm glad you asked. The difficulty of chronic wasting disease is that is a very slow acting disease and the symptoms of the disease are also very similar to other diseases. So basically, if a deer is in very poor condition, heavy, drooling, walking in circles, things like that definitely showing their ribs, bad coat, that kind of stuff. They're wasting away. Why say I'm glad you asked that? Its that a lot of deer in our urban subdivisions are at very high densities and they already look that way.
So unfortunately, you can't look at a deer and know that it has chronic wasting disease. The only way that we can test is we can check to see if the deer has diseases by testing it. The way we test it is we pull issues from a deceased animal. So letting us know about deer that look in poor condition is great, but we're not able to test those animals until they've succumbed to something, until they've already died.
So generally, if we get that call about a deer that's in poor condition, you know, our first question is, where is it? And then is that deer close to death or is it still alive and moving? Can we maybe get over there and pull a sample to test it?
You can find out more about CWD and the state's efforts to contain it here.
