USDA And Interior Departments
Offer Wasting Disease Program

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior have delivered Congress a national plan for assisting states, federal agencies and tribes in controlling the growing threat to elk and deer from chronic wasting disease.

The plan details how federal agencies can assist states and help develop consensus-based approaches that states and industry may adopt to manage this disease. The plan was developed by a joint working group co-chaired by USDA and DOI. The working group, which was announced May 16 in testimony before a joint hearing of two House Resources Subcommittees, held its first meeting May 24.

Several states have established chronic wasting disease programs. However, lack of resources in some states and lack of uniform standards have prevented establishment of minimum criteria for an effective nationwide program.

To fill this gap, the joint working group has developed a plan that addresses disease management, diagnostics, research, surveillance and information dissemination. Highlights of the plan’s proposals include:

• Identification of best practices for herd management to help prevent introduction of chronic wasting disease into the herd;
• How to prevent contact between free-ranging and captive animals, animal identification and culling versus eradication;
• Development of better tests for the disease, both postmortem and live-animal;
• Prioritizing critical research needs, genotyping and transmissibility;
• Describing best practices for targeted, hunter-harvest and outbreak surveillance; and
• Development of uniform standards for disease data collection and information transfer through a web-based application.

Plan details will soon be available on the web at: www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/cwd/index.html.

Chronic wasting disease, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, currently is known to affect free-ranging deer and/or elk in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Wisconsin and New Mexico. States that currently have or have had farmed elk herds with the disease are South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Montana. There is no evidence that the disease is linked to any disease in humans or domestic animals.