Texas Parks and Wildlife Department this past Tuesday issued an emergency order to impose additional restrictions on deer breeding facilities where chronic wasting disease, or CWD, has been positively detected.
“We now have six breeding facilities since late March have had positive CWD deer in them,” said Wildlife Division Director John Silovsky.
First detected in Texas in 2012, the disease has been closely monitored by the state agency.
Three cases of CWD were found this year in the free-ranging deer population.
“We’ve had 66 free-range deer that were positive for CWD out of the 257 total positive animals across the state,” he said.
There is no evidence that CWD can affect humans, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that no one should eat meat from an animal that has tested positive for the disease.
