Georgia wildlife officials announced Thursday that the state has confirmed its first case of Chronic Wasting Disease. The positive sample was taken from a hunter-harvested whitetail buck that was killed on private property in Lanier County, according to a public press release from the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division. This makes Georgia the 36th U.S. state to confirm the presence of CWD in its wild deer herd.
Although concerning for Georgia deer hunters, the discovery is not all that surprising given the extent of the disease’s spread in the South. Mississippi became the first state in the southeastern U.S. to confirm CWD in its wild deer in 2018, and the disease has spread to six other states in the region since then, most recently in North Carolina. Looking at the USGS map of CWD prevalence in North America, the disease has been confirmed in every state that touches Georgia with the exception of South Carolina.
“I want to assure hunters that deer hunting will continue to thrive in Georgia, despite this current discovery,” Georgia Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Walter Rabon said Thursday. “Working together with our hunters and all Georgians, we will manage CWD and maintain healthy deer herds.”
State officials say the positive result was confirmed by the federal National Veterinary Services Lab in Ames, Iowa, and that the two-and-a-half-year-old buck was sampled as part of the state’s routine CWD surveillance program. Georgia began testing hunter-harvested and sick deer for the disease in 2002. Officials say they’ve tested approximately 20,000 deer since then, with an average of 1,800 samples collected each year.
That number will almost certainly increase as wildlife managers implement the state’s CWD response plan, which automatically went into effect Thursday.
The first phase of that plan, what wildlife managers are calling “initial response,” is to establish a CWD Management Area that includes each county within a five-mile radius of a positive test result. (The current CMA includes both Lanier and Berrien Counties.) Officials will try to increase the amount of samples collected from wild deer in the CMA so they can better determine the prevalence and geographical extent of the disease.
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For now, samples will still be submitted by hunters on a voluntary basis. The state could eventually shift to mandatory testing, as is currently required in parts of other states — like Texas and Colorado — where CWD is more widespread. And the current plan opens the door to future rules and restrictions around carcass disposal.
This initial response phase will also heighten the state’s focus on deer populations in high-fence enclosures within the CMA. (Some high-fence operations in other states have proven to be hotbeds for CWD.) It requires the Georgia Department of Agriculture to work with GWRD in order to identify and increase sampling at these high-fence operations.
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