Chronic wasting disease (CWD) remains a key focus for research at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC). CWD infects elk, white-tailed deer, and mule deer, but is not known to infect livestock or humans currently. No treatment is known and the disease is typically fatal.
With deer harvests complete, the NWHC has updated its map of the distribution of CWD in North America.
Source: USGS, January 2017.
Research is concentrated on:
- Understanding how the disease is transmitted among elk and deer, understanding the patterns of infection, and determining how infection rates differ according to age and sex of the animal.
- Searching for indications of genetic resistance to CWD, and developing tools for understanding CWD epidemics.
- Studying the role that infected deer carcasses play in CWD transmission and how feeding and baiting may affect transmission patterns.
- Exploring the susceptibility of small mammals and their potential role in the transmission of CWD.
INSIGHTS: In 1978, Dr. Elizabeth Williams determined that CWD was a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), a family of diseases that includes scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, mad-cow disease) in cattle, and kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans.