HELENA – Montana wildlife officials tested about 2,000 deer, elk and moose collected during the 2008-2009 hunting season and did not detect chronic wasting disease in any of the animals tested.
The fatal disease affects the nervous system of members of the deer family.
No one is sure where CWD came from. It first showed up in the wild in 1981. Since then it has been found in wild herds or game farms in 15 states and the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Montana’s detection program tests sick and road-killed deer, elk and moose; and hunter harvest samples collected in “high risk” areas along Montana’s borders with Wyoming, South Dakota, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
“Although we have not found CWD in wildlife populations of Montana, given the location of the disease in wild elk, deer and moose in adjacent states and Canadian provinces it is likely that we will find it at some point” said Neil Anderson, FWP’s Wildlife Laboratory supervisor.
Over the past 11 years the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks has tested more than 14,000 wild elk and deer in Montana for CWD and has not yet found any evidence of the disease.
CWD was diagnosed in 1999 in nine captive elk on a game farm near Philipsburg. All the animals there were destroyed and the facility was quarantined.