Tribes are preparing for the inevitable arrival of chronic wasting disease (CWD), a neurological degenerative condition that can shorten the lifespan of deer and elk.
While no documented cases have shown up in western Washington, six white-tailed deer tested positive in eastern Washington in 2024, said Dylan Bergman, wildlife biologist for the Point No Point Treaty Council, a natural resources consortium that supports the Jamestown S’Klallam and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes.
Expecting CWD to show up in the region within the next decade, Bergman recently held workshops about the disease with tribal natural resources staff and law enforcement.
“Once widespread, we could see 20-50% of deer dying from CWD, and 5-20% of elk dying,” he said. “We need to develop a plan for how to address infected animals when it starts showing up here.”
Field staff and tribal hunters should be aware of what to look for when hunting or conducting field work. Symptoms in the animals include drooling, staring into space, and no startle response to stimuli—the latter making them more likely to be hit by vehicles.
“The lack of response is a pretty clear indicator of late-stage disease progression,” Bergman said. “They may stop being afraid of humans and may be visibly skinny.”
CWD is not virus, but a misshaped protein called a prion that causes normal proteins to become deformed, leading to neurological degradation. While symptoms may not show up for the first six months, the time from onset of disease to death is highly variable and could take up to 18 months and longer, Bergman said.
Similar to mad cow disease and scabies, CWD is contagious within herds and can be spread via urine, tissue, nose-to-nose contact and saliva. While not yet seen in black-tailed deer, CWD increases rapidly in white-tailed deer and mule deer and can also affect elk, caribou and moose.
The easiest way to test a wild animal is by removing lymph nodes from behind the larynx and just below the jawbone. Workshop attendees received their own sampling kits to use in the field or on roadkill.
Ideally, once an elk or deer is harvested and lymph nodes are removed, Bergman said, the carcass would be put in cold storage to preserve the animal while samples are tested, which can take several weeks. If the results come back negative, the hunter could then process the animal.
Human health risks are unknown, and while there has been no documentation of CWD moving from an animal to a human, USDA recommends against eating a CWD-positive animal, Bergman said.
With CWD now in eastern Washington, it could be a decade before it shows up in the Olympic Mountains, he said, with the Olympic Peninsula being somewhat insular from the Cascade Mountains by Interstate 5 and Puget Sound.
Within populations, CWD takes a few years to spread before animal numbers tank, Bergman said. After that, herds build resistance and can live longer with CWD, so reproduction builds back up over a few years.
State agencies have tried to manage the spread of the disease by hunting to reduce herd densities but generally, it is difficult to stop the spread and there is no vaccine or cure, Bergman said.
CWD is a relatively new disease, first documented in the 1970s in the Rocky Mountains, and scientists suspect it jumped from sheep to deer. It became more widely known in the 1990s as it spread across the United States and has been getting more attention in the last decade.
Testing of elk and deer is now mandatory in some areas of eastern Washington, and transport of deer, elk, moose and caribou from eastern Washington is restricted to animal hides, clean skulls and processed meats.
Above: PNPTC wildlife biologist Dylan Bergman, center, teaches tribal staff to sample lymph nodes from the neck of a deer to be tested for chronic wasting disease. Story and photos by Tiffany Royal.
