Georgia Rut Map

State officials keep eye out for Chronic Wasting Disease among deer

A recent social media post by the S.C. Dept. of Natural Resources regarding Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which affects the deer family, made me do a double take.

The good news is that CWD has not been detected in South Carolina’s deer herd.

But the map of the U.S. and Canada showing where CWD has and has not shown up was certainly an attention-getter. The map shows how widespread CWD has become, with only a few donut holes where it has not been detected.

South Carolina and Georgia comprise one of those donut holes, but CWD has been detected in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. The list is a long one.

So, what is CWD and why should we take note?

SCDNR offers a comprehensive look on its website (https://dnr.sc.gov/wildlife/deer/index.html).

It is a neurological disease, always fatal, that affects members of the cervid, or deer family. It is transmissible, or contagious for deer. The Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization say there is no link between CWD in deer and human health.

“It’s transmissible, and you don’t ever want to have to deal with a transmissible disease in wildlife,” said Charles Ruth, Big Game Program Coordinator for SCDNR. “It spreads from deer to deer. It can spread widely, and we know that the disease is 100-percent fatal. There is no deer that has ever recovered from it.

“You have to think of CWD in terms of very slow growth. But there comes a point in time where the prevalence of the disease gets high enough, it turns your population trajectory down because it’s killing deer. Once it gets out there in a high enough portion of the animals and they start dying, then your deer population starts declining. We’ve seen that a little bit out west in some mule deer populations.”

CWD originated out west and crossed the Mississippi in 2002 or 2003, Ruth said. That concerned the states east of the Mississippi, which began keeping tabs on CWD.