With hunting season in full swing, hunters from across Montana will be venturing out to fill their deer tags. This season, though, there is an increased risk of coming across deer afflicted with chronic wasting disease (CWD). Last year CWD popped up in Montana in Carbon County, with it spreading across the state this year. The area around Libby, Montana has become a hotspot for the disease and the latest cases have been confirmed right here in Yellowstone County, just outside of Huntley. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) is establishing a new CWD management zone including all of Yellowstone County as well as part of big Horn County north of I-90 and west of the Bighorn River.

A two-year-old deer killed in Huntley this September tested positive for the disease, with a lab at Colorado State University confirming the results. This marks the first time CWD has made a foray into Yellowstone County. Within the new management zone, people hunting deer, elk, and moose will not be allowed to transport the animals’ heads or spines out of the zones in an attempt to keep CWD from spreading to new counties. CWD is a type of always fatal diseases known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies that occurs in cervids (deer, elk, moose, reindeer, caribou) where a naturally occurring protein, prion, becomes misfolded and resists being broken down by the body the way normal proteins are. They infect the brain and cause the animal’s body to begin producing more CWD prions instead of its normal proteins which begins damaging the nervous system. CWD can be present in an animal for up to two years before they start showing any outward sign of the disease. It falls into the same category as mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, all of which are incurable and always fatal.

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