02/11/2020- More than a year and a half has passed since chronic wasting disease was first discovered in Marinette County in a captive 2-year-old doe and so far, that remains the only case. Caroline Ward is a Wisconsin DNR Wildlife Biologist and says in 2019 the agency worked with the County’s foresters to issue dozens of public land surveillance permits to sample for CWD and offered free testing during the deer hunt. Although the prevalence of CWD has increased rapidly in other parts of the state, none of the local deer screened last year tested positive.
Michigan counties sampled even more deer in 2019. In Dickinson County where CWD was detected in a wild deer in October of 2018, 549 deer were tested for the fatal neurological disease, while more than 800 were tested in Menominee County last year. Ward reports that none of the deer sampled in either of those counties tested positive.