Disease Prevention, Control, Monitoring
Disease can have a devastating effect on wildlife. There are several diseases that are common in Arizona’s wildlife and affect game and nongame species alike. Wildlife biologists are constantly on the lookout for injured, sick or dead wildlife and often collect biological samples for testing. Arizona Game and Fish has a dedicated wildlife veterinarian and Wildlife Health Program. Hunters are encouraged to report sick or dead animals, especially if they suspect illness or poaching.
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Video Transcript
Transcript for Chronic Wasting Disease
Speaker: Arizona Game & Fish has completed its testing of deer and elk for Chronic Wasting Disease for the 2011 hunting season. The department tested 1,185 deer and elk during the 2011 season and did not detect the disease in any Arizona animals. Testing will resume this fall. Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD, is a neurological disease that attacks the brain in deer, elk, and moose and is characterized by progressive weight loss, abnormal behavior, and eventually death.
Anne Justice-Allen, DVM, Arizona Game & Fish: It causes the animals to behave abnormally because it basically puts holes in the brain, and a holey brain doesn’t work too well. So, they have abnormal behavior. They may act like they’re blind. They may do a lot of salivating. They have an increased desire for water, so they want to drink a lot, and they don’t raise their young normally. And so, this can reduce the number of animals that reproduce.
Speaker: Chronic Wasting Disease has been found in deer and elk in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, but it has not been detected in Arizona.
Anne Justice-Allen: In New Mexico, it is limited to the areas east of the Rio Grande. So, there’s not only a lot of territory but a fairly significant river between the infected animals here and the border of Arizona. And in Utah, it is north of the Glen Canyon Recreational Area, so it’s north of the Grand Canyon and Lake Powell. And there’s a lot of very rugged territory between Arizona and Utah.
Because CWD is quite a bit a way away from Arizona, and the disease is transmitted by animal movement primarily, we are not expecting CWD to show up in Arizona in any short period of time. We have been monitoring deer and elk in Arizona for the presence of the disease for more than 10 years and have not detected it in any of the thousands of animals that we have sampled. And we are going to continue monitoring for it.
Speaker: Arizona Game & Fish is doing the heaviest monitoring along our border with New Mexico and on the Kaibab Plateau, south of the Utah land.
Anne Justice-Allen: We are looking for it in deer and elk that are harvested by our hunters here in the state. We have check stations set up on the Kaibab, and we remove the lymph nodes from the throat area of the deer and elk and those are sent to a lab and tested for the presence of the prion.
And we do a similar check station in eastern Arizona as well, or hunters can bring their animals to a regional office, or we have a number of taxidermists and meat processors—game meat processors—that are working with the department to save us the lymph nodes from the animals so that we can test those. So, it’s quite an extensive operation using a lot of different personnel, and every year, we test around 2,000 samples and that’s enough to detect the disease and if it were occurring in less than 1% of the animals. So, that’s a very significant sample size, and we can definitely say that we do not have Chronic Wasting Disease in our deer and elk herds in this state.
Speaker: Arizona Game & Fish is continually working to help our state maintain its CWD–free status.
Anne Justice-Allen: In 2010, we developed a new CWD response plan and management plan, and in that response and management plan, we identified some changes that we need to make to the rules in order to reduce even further the possibility of introduction of CWD into the state. And the first thing that we identified was that we should prohibit people from bringing in intact carcasses and untreated, untaxidermied mounts and trophies. So, we’re going to change the rule that way. The additional thing that we identified is that should we detect CWD in Arizona, we should have a response plan, which we now have.
Speaker: While CWD is fatal to deer, elk, and moose, there have been no reported cases of humans ever being infected.
Anne Justice-Allen: Researchers have been really pushed to try and determine whether or not people are susceptible to Chronic Wasting Disease, and there is no evidence to date that people can get Chronic Wasting Disease. So, it’s limited strictly to deer and deer species—so deer, elk, and moose are all very closely related, and they are susceptible, but people are not.