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A provincial program to test animals for chronic wasting disease may be here to stay.
Premier Scott Moe said his government will reconsider the decision at meetings later this week after the program was initially scheduled to be cut because of budget concerns.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that affects members of the deer family.
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Speaking recently on The Evan Bray Show, Darrell Crabbe, acting executive officer with the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, said Saskatchewan is a hotspot for the disease.
“Chronic wasting disease came into our province via game farming. Game farming was introduced into Saskatchewan in the early part of the 1990s,” Crabbe said.
“The first confirmed case, I believe, of chronic wasting disease in Saskatchewan was on a game farm in ’96. The first confirmed case in the wild was in 2000, and since then it has spread through a fairly large part of Saskatchewan.”
Asked about the province potentially losing its ability to test for CWD, Crabbe said the decision would affect more than just Saskatchewan.
“One of the other unfortunate parts of this is that because we have chronic wasting disease here, Alberta also has it now, but they have pretty aggressive testing regimes in Alberta and Manitoba to try to track and determine where the disease is and where it isn’t,” Crabbe said.
“So it’d be really unfortunate if Saskatchewan decided that we’re just going to drop the ball and go home, that we’ve given up on it.”
Similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, CWD affects animals including mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, caribou and moose.
Symptoms of CWD typically take 18 to 24 months to appear, and the disease is always fatal.
Symptoms include difficulty moving, weight loss and behavioural changes such as reduced interaction with other animals, listlessness, a lowered head, tremors and nervousness.
Animals with CWD may also exhibit excessive salivation and teeth grinding.
While the loss of the testing program is a divisive issue among hunters in the province, Crabbe said it likely would affect participation in the activity.
“I have absolutely no doubt it would have. There’s thousands of people that get their heads tested every year, and I don’t know, we haven’t surveyed them, but people like myself, I get them tested because I have grandchildren, and I would not feed CWD-infected meat to my family.”
There have been no documented cases of CWD in humans, and public health agencies consider the risk of transmission through the consumption of wild meat to be low.
However, transmission of CWD to other species, including squirrel monkeys and humanized mice, has been observed in experimental settings.
