NISKU, Alta. – Alberta Agriculture spends more than $1 million a year searching for fatal, progressive brain diseases in deer, elk, cattle and sheep, says Gerald Ollis, the province’s chief veterinarian.
Ollis said searching for chronic wasting disease in farmed and wild deer and elk cost the department $786,240 last year. Add the costs of enhanced surveillance for bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and scrapie in sheep and the total was more than $1 million.
“There’s an awful lot of other things that can’t get done,” he said. “We’re talking a lot of things that could be worked with.”
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Ollis estimated it costs $130 in labour and laboratory time to test one animal. Drought and the positive test of an elk and white-tailed deer in Alberta have forced the number of tests to skyrocket.
Thirty deer and elk heads were tested in 1996,when the department began testing for CWD. In 2002, the it tested 4,985 farmed deer and elk and 1,057 deer and elk from the wild.
Alberta has 11, 340 deer on 192 farms and 42,956 elk on 460 farms.
A voluntary CWD surveillance program was introduced in 1996 and made mandatory in 2002. Now the heads of elk and deer older than one year that died on the farm or are slaughtered for meat must be tested for the disease. The low prices for animals and high cost of feed have increased the number of animals that are slaughtered, said Ollis.
The department has invested heavily in disease testing since an elk tested positive for the disease in March 2002 and a white-tailed deer in October 2002.
It takes eight to 10 days to get test results from slaughtered animals.
“Eight to 10 days is not satisfactory for us or the industry,” Ollis told a chronic wasting disease conference.
Margo Pybus, wildlife disease specialist with the Alberta Fish and Wildlife Division, said testing heads from wild deer and elk shot near where the two positive cases were found is a priority.
There have been no cases of CWD in wild deer and elk in Alberta since the wildlife surveillance began in 1996. There have been seven positive cases in wild deer and elk in Saskatchewan.
