The minister responsible for managing Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the southeast corner of B.C. defended the province's actions and praised the support of hunters, First Nations and local governments in responding to its arrival in the province.
Randene Neill, Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, said managing CWD is a priority for the province, during a media scrum in Cranbrook on March 24.
"The only way we're going to help keep those numbers really low is if we've got everyone working together, so that means we need those samples every time a deer is killed in a road accident or by a hunter or in a special hunt or by contracts that we get to try and cull some deer to see what the numbers are looking like," said Neill, in response to funding and staffing concerns raised by local wildlife advocates.
"We need us all on the same page, so we understand the concerns, we are prioritizing Chronic Wasting Disease, we want to make sure the numbers stay as low as possible and that's why we're going to listen to the science, listen to what works in other [U.S.] states where it has become quite prevalent and stay on top of it so it does not become a widespread issue here."
Advocates such as the BC Wildlife Federation have been calling for more funding and staff resources to manage the emergence of the disease in the province.
Neill was in the Kootenay region to meet with local governments, First Nations, and tour Elk Valley Resources operations, among other commitments.
While Neill didn't make a formal announcement, she said plans are potentially in the works to bring a mobile testing lab into the region for next hunting season.
Currently, samples are tested out of a facility in Abbotsford.
This past hunting season returned approximately 4,000 samples for testing, with turnaround times running between one to two months at the peak. That same facility was also testing for Avian flu, which put a strain on testing resources.
"When we started testing all the deer last fall that the hunters gave us, we had almost 4,000 samples. I don't think we were expecting to get that many," Neill said. "So we didn't do as good enough job as we should have in organizing those samples and getting them in, in a really expedited way. Now we know what to expect so we need to do a better job."
The province recently conducted a testing program for urban deer in Cranbrook and Kimberley with the goal of collecting 100 samples in each community. Cranbrook returned one positive test result out of 100, while Kimberley returned all negative results, however, only 26 deer were taken.
"We had a couple days interrupted by a couple folks who were following the crews around just to see what they were doing, which prevented us from being able to tranquilize the deer to take them away to get tested," said Neill, in response to the results of the Kimberley program.
According to Neill, the turnaround testing times for the urban deer program 鈥� which ran from Feb. 18-28 鈥� took roughly a week.
Beyond CWD testing, the province has also radio-collared 10 urban deer in Cranbrook, with plans to do 10 more, in order to track the movement patterns of those deer within the city to see if and how CWD may spread. Plans are also in the works to radio-collar 20 urban deer in Kimberley for the same purpose as well as five deer in the Aqam community.
Since early 2024, six cases of CWD have been identified in the province 鈥� all in the immediate region in or around Cranbrook.
CWD affects cervids, such as deer, moose, elk and caribou, and is a condition of the central nervous system caused by infectious agents called prions, which kill cells in the brain as they accumulate and lead to neurological disease.
Prions, a type of protein, also accumulate in other tissues and may be shed by the infected animal into water or on plants and bedding through saliva, urine and feces.
It is 100 per cent fatal to wildlife with no known treatment.
However it is not known to affect humans or livestock, although public health guidance recommends that animals with CWD should not be consumed.
