One thousand more game farm elk will be exterminated in Saskatchewan as federal officials eradicate herds that have come in contact with chronic wasting disease.
Individual animals in each of three more herds have been found to have CWD. Following Canadian Food Inspection Agency policy, the rest of the herds will be destroyed.
There is no live test for CWD, so the only way to diagnose it is to kill it and examine the brain.
The latest total means 25 herds and more than 4,500 animals have been destroyed since the most recent CWD outbreak began in 2000.
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However, only a few dozen animals have been found to have the disease. Federal veterinarians say there is no reason to believe CWD has spread out of control.
“So far, so good,” said CFIA veterinarian George Luterbach.
“One can still relate all of these back to the original source.”
The CFIA believes a Lloydminster game farm imported a sick elk in 1990. That herd was not discovered to be diseased until 2000.
Infected animals from that herd were sold to many other herds during the 1990s. The CFIA destroyed all the herds originally found to have CWD-infected animals. It then traced all the animals sold from those herds, killed them and analyzed them.
Any herd found to have an infected animal was exterminated.
The three newly discovered diseased herds were infected by a herd that had been infected by the original source herd, Luterbach said.
There have been no independent outbreaks of CWD.
All have been connected to the original infected farm.
Canada has had no outbreaks outside of Saskatchewan.
In the United States, the disease has been found in a number of states, including North Dakota, Montana and Nebraska.
The disease is endemic in a section of Wyoming and Colorado among wild animals.
Saskatchewan discovered an infected wild deer this spring near the Alberta border.
It was one of more than 1,500 whose heads were donated by hunters after the fall hunting season.
The prairie provinces are now running programs in which producers provide the heads of domestic elk that have died on their farms.
In Alberta and Saskatchewan the program is voluntary. It is mandatory in Manitoba. So far none of these animals have been discovered to have CWD.
“There has been a real groundswell of producers who have joined that program,” said Luterbach.
