By Emily Franks
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Nathan Ogden believes it’s just a matter of time before he encounters the disease that’s killing deer and elk before he gets the chance to hunt them in northwest Arkansas.
“I’m sure it’s here, because it’s over there and over there,” he said, referring to chronic wasting disease.
“It’s got to be here. We just haven’t killed one that has tested positive.”
Ogden, 40, said the disease is quietly killing animals as it spreads into the area.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal neurological disease that affects cervids—members of the deer and elk family, and was first discovered in Colorado in 1967.
In only 52 years, chronic wasting disease has spread to 26 states, as well as Canada, Norway, Finland and South Korea.
Caused by misshapen proteins, chronic wasting disease is similar to mad cow disease found in cattle. It is a slow-progressing disease, and infected animals will eventually become thin and demonstrate abnormal behavior.
The disease is always fatal.
Ogden and the five other members of his camp are sure they will soon harvest a CWD+ deer or elk.
As soon as the disease was discovered in Arkansas in 2016, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission hired its first veterinarian, Jennifer Ballard.
Testing the area for the disease, Ballard’s team found that there was already a 23 percent prevalence in northwest Arkansas.
Ballard established a wildlife health program to create a management plan for chronic wasting disease. The commission also organized public meetings to keep Arkansas residents informed on the topic.
Ford Overton, Chairman of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said that the town hall meetings were organized to address the public’s questions and concerns about the disease.
“As commissioners, we serve the citizens of the state of Arkansas,” Overton said. “We felt that it was important to provide an open environment format where anybody could show up and ask questions.”
Ogden’s camp is on Bernie Mountain, which lies on the Madison side of the Madison and Newton County lines. When the disease was announced in the area, Ogden started attending the agency’s public meetings to learn more.
As of Jan. 10, 2019, Newton County has 373 confirmed cases of chronic wasting disease. Madison County has 47 cases.
The disease is caused by a misfolded prion, a protein that is highly concentrated in the brain. When cervids are exposed to the misshapen prion, the normal proteins in the brain start to misfold in a cascading way. An accumulation of the misfolded proteins in the brain causes the cells in the brainstem to die.
After a cervid is exposed to the misshapen prion through bodily fluids, it can take 12 to 18 months before the animal shows any signs of sickness.
This delay between contraction and symptoms is one of the biggest challenges in managing the disease.
“Even before the animals look sick, they are shedding that misfolded prion,” Ballard said. “The infected cervids expose a lot of animals to the disease before they themselves show symptoms of it.”
The delayed symptoms include weight loss, excessive thirst, and an abnormal gait and posture.
“The infected animals show a lot of the signs that you would expect if your brain isn’t working right,” Ballard said. “They lose their fear of humans, and other animals exclude them from the group. Once they start showing signs, the progression to death is usually pretty quick; it just takes a while to get to the point where they are displaying symptoms.”
All 605 cases of the disease in the state have been found in northwest Arkansas, with over half of the cases in Newton County.
Jimmy Dixon hunts on the Gene Rush Wildlife Management Area, which is about 15 miles west of his home in Jasper.
Hunting in the heart of Newton County, Dixon was not stunned when the deer he harvested on the first day rifle season came back positive for chronic wasting disease.
Though the deer looked perfectly healthy, Dixon decided to test the animal for the disease because he knew the prevalence in the area.
“I wasn’t surprised that my deer had CWD,” Dixon said. “I had already talked to other hunters who had harvested deer earlier in the season, and a good number of those deer were coming back as CWD positive.”
There has never been a human case of chronic wasting disease, but Dixon was happy to comply with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to avoid consuming meat from an infected cervid.
“Even though there’s never been a human case, we still recommend that people take due caution because prions evolve,” Ballard said.
The CWD Management Zone has been established to help contain the disease by executing management strategies within high-risk counties.
The zone identifies counties with positive cases, as well as the surrounding counties within 10 miles of a positive case, which takes into account the natural movement of the deer.
The commission has enacted several regulations in the zone to slow the spread of the disease. Hoping to use hunter harvest to break the transmission cycle, they have removed antler point restrictions and increased the bag limit in the management zone.
The wilderness agency has also implemented restrictions on moving carcasses out of the zone to slow the spreading of the disease through human movement.
“We can’t stop every animal at the county line, but we can affect how much humans participate in the movement of the disease,” Ballard said.
Since the southeast Delta is home to Arkansas’s premier deer hunting, the aggregation of the disease in northwest Arkansas might seem perplexing.
However, the concentration is no coincidence, Ballard said.
Because animals breed as they move, gene flow is an indicator of animal movement.
A state-wide assessment of the disease has shown that the genes of cervids in northwest Arkansas are different than the genes of many of the surrounding populations, indicating a lack of gene flow.
“It seems that that population has isolated itself,” Ballard said. “We think it’s probably natural isolation caused by the steep geography. The disease is not spreading out of that zone very quickly because the deer don’t move out of that zone very regularly.”
Ballard said that while the isolation of the infected population has helped slow the spread of the disease, it also probably delayed initial detection.
“We wouldn’t have found it unless we tested in exactly the right spot,” she said.
Another challenge with the disease is its slow response to management.
“It could take seven or 10 years before we start to see the benefit of our management plan,” Ballard said. “It’s hard to keep staff and resources focused when the consequences won’t come for a long time.”
Ballard encourages Arkansas outdoorsmen and women to take advantage of the commission’s transparency on the issue.
“We’ve tried to be very open about the whole situation,” Ballard said. “We share everything we know about CWD in the state. I would encourage people to check out our website, come to our public meetings and stay informed on the issue.”
Samples for testing animals for the disease cannot be taken until they have perished, a hurdle that makes it much harder for biologists to kill off the disease.
“Since you can’t test live animals, there’s no getting rid of it without killing everything,” Ogden said.
Because species extermination is both impossible and unwelcome in the area, Ogden says that chronic wasting disease is something hunters are going to have to learn to work around.
Many other states in the central U.S. are fighting the same battle against chronic wasting disease, which has now spread as far as the east coast.
As of February 2019, Virginia has 66 confirmed cases of chronic wasting disease.
Similarly to Arkansas, Virginia has developed a CWD Containment Area to help manage the disease. To minimize the transmission of chronic wasting disease, their wildlife department has banned feeding and baiting deer in the Containment Area in an attempt to decrease the transfer of deer saliva.
Wisconsin is one of the country’s hot spots for the disease, with a whopping 5,234 confirmed cases. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has implemented carcass restrictions to limit the spread of the disease.
Cervids harvested in disease-infected areas of Wisconsin can be moved to other infected areas, but they cannot be moved to areas where the disease has not been found.
However, the Quality Deer Management Association recently released a map depicting the home zip codes of hunters who traveled from the other states to hunt deer in Wisconsin.
The fear is that infected meat from the disease hotspot may have been circulated throughout the country in this way.
Ballard said that the chance of exterminating the disease is grim, but she’s hoping that ongoing national research will yield new ways to combat the disease.
“We’re definitely not going to eradicate this disease with the tools we have now,” Ballard said. “We hope that more tools and new technologies will become available to help us address CWD in the future. But for now, we can only hope to stabilize the disease through collaboration with hunters.”