Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute says risk threatens public health, environment and access to international markets
While discovery of protective genetics and development of vaccines are progressing, chronic wasting disease has fallen off the public radar — and that threatens Canadian agriculture.
“You know, we have lots of people who look for any excuse possible not to trade with us,” said Ted Bilyea, chief strategy officer with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.
“It’s a protectionist thing. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand this is a risk.”
Bilyea is former executive vice-president with Maple Leaf Foods and still sits on its corporate board. He said Canada’s reputation for having a premium product helps sell a lot of that product and it’s critical to protect the national reputation.
Read Also
Conservation groups enter grazing lease debate
The Municipal District of Taber in southern Alberta remains at a political crossroads, weighing the interests of generating revenue for public services with conserving native grasslands.
CWD is a disease that affects cervids, that is deer and elk and their relatives. It has spread across some of the northwestern U.S. states, Western Canada and is causing deaths among those animals. Reports from northern states such as Wyoming, for example, are showing a drop in cervid numbers.
This June, CAPI released a comprehensive analysis and policy recommendation document on CWD. Authored by some of the top prion disease experts in the country, it is a wake-up call that implications of the disease’s prevalence in the environment has profound implications for Canada’s agriculture and food industries.
“We’ve been thinking about it for a while, but COVID was the push,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got to take diseases more seriously. Because human health, economic health and mental health are obviously connected.”
As an example, Bilyea points to Norway’s decision in 2018 to ban all forage imports from any Canadian province with CWD or U.S. state with CWD. While hay is not a major export crop, there is no reason why such a decision couldn’t be taken for larger volume commodities such as wheat.
Adding to the concern is a soon-to-be published study on macaques, a type of monkey that is used as an analogue for humans. The study fed meat from CWD-infected cervids (deer and their relatives) to the animals. Over time, the macaques developed disease and two died.
So far, there is no evidence that CWD can jump to cattle, at least through direct contact or feeding if cattle, deer, and elk share the same range.
Debbie McKenzie, a CWD expert from the University of Alberta, collaborated on the CAPI report with postdoctoral researcher Alicia Otero Garcia. She said studies show CWD can affect the bovine brain, but researchers had to inject the prion directly into their skulls. Other studies have put cattle onto known CWD-contaminated land and shown no infections over 10 years. But she cautioned that the sample sizes were small — 10 or 12 cattle at a time.
“In a very central core area of Wisconsin, about 56 percent of the whitetail bucks are infected,” she said. “The mule deer bucks in the South Saskatchewan River valley are about 85 percent positive. Now we have this massive amount of infectivity that we didn’t have when any of those studies was started.”
She points out that even if the chance of transmission to cattle is extremely low, it becomes more likely with tens of thousands of exposures between cattle and cervids.
For most city dwellers, wild game is a rarity on the family dinner table. But for people in rural and remote areas, and in particular Indigenous communities, it’s a staple part of the diet and essential to food security. That means testing for CWD before eating any wild meat.
“I think the biggest message is to try to work out ways of getting their animals tested,” McKenzie said. “That often brings in a lot of issues and concerns.”
In Alberta, for instance, game farmers test all of their animals. Hunters drop the heads of their kills at government depots for later testing. This can take time, and the temptation to put a venison roast on the table can lead some people to take a chance.
For more remote communities, the need to transport heads over long distances makes testing even more impractical.
McKenzie and her colleagues have started working with partners among the Treaty 8 First Nations on easier testing protocols. For example, hunters could be trained to take samples of lymph nodes and brain tissue that could be more easily transported to testing facilities.
Even if it is confined to cervids, CWD poses a threat both directly to the health of people who eat wild game and indirectly through businesses such as game farms and outfitters.
Ellen Goddard, an agricultural economist from the University of Alberta who specializes in CWD, said a comprehensive, cross-jurisdictional approach is essential to control the disease.
“Wildlife itself is complicated to manage anywhere in Canada and across borders with the U.S. because you need so many different levels of government involved,” she said. “And wildlife is a provincial mandate. If the wildlife can cross provincial boundaries, and if other provinces are not aligned with a common management strategy, it becomes almost impossible to control.”
This means tight alignment among national governments, as well as Indigenous, provincial, and territorial governments. On the bright side, Goddard said this necessity could help achieve long-sought goals.
“We’ve never had a history of a massively productive relationship,” she said. “Although this may well facilitate more co-management of wildlife because of concern in Indigenous communities.”
One common factor CAPI found was the value that Canadians give to wildlife, not only as a food source, but for itself. Farmers and ranchers like looking out the window and seeing a group of deer or spotting elk on their rangeland. City folk flock to wilderness parks hoping to catch a glimpse.
“The public has an enormous sense of value associated with the wildlife itself,” Goddard said.
“They see it as something that should be protected, regardless of whether they are people that go into the bush every weekend or not. Regardless of whether they hunt. They see it as an important part of the landscape.”
The full CAPI report is available at capi-icpa.ca/explore/resources.
