Chronic Wasting Disease continues to spread, the CFIA says
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is looking for deer and elk producers to provide feedback on proposed changes to Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) control programs.
The current program launched fully in 2019 with a focus on prevention and early detection in farmed cervid herds.
But the program isn’t working as planned.
“Our current CWD Control Program is not meeting our goal of controlling CWD through promotion of preventing disease introduction and early detection in farmed cervid herds. Infected cervid populations have continued to spread geographically in Canada since implementation of the current program in 2019,” a CFIA backgrounder says.
Canadian producers are raising 29,655 farm raised cervids on 402 farms, AAFC data from 2024 says.
A large majority of cases of CWD are in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Between 2011 and the most current confirmed case of CWD on Aug. 8 of this year, every instance except one has been in one of those two provinces.
A case of CWD in a deer in Quebec in September 2018 is the outlier.
A proposed change to the current CWD control program would recognize regional variability.
Under these amendments, “we will consider CWD to be established in a province or territory where CWD has been detected in wild and farmed cervids for 2 or more consecutive years,” the CFIA says.
A jurisdiction will be considered “emerging” if CWD has been detected in some wild populations for two years but not in farmed herds.
This means CWD would be considered established in Alberta and Saskatchewan, emerging in Manitoba, and not detected elsewhere in Canada, the CFIA says.
The CFIA is also proposing changes to how it handles depopulation in infected herds.
The 2019 program stated herds participating in a Voluntary Herd Certification Program would be ordered depopulated if the herd reached a certain threshold.
The new program would do away with that.
“In the limited spectrum of tools that exist to control CWD, destruction of infected cervid herds can only be considered as an eradication measure when the disease has not yet become established in the wild cervid population in the vicinity of the farm. Therefore, we are proposing that we will not order destruction of CWD-infected herds in provinces or territories where CWD is established or emerging,” an information sheet reads.
Canadians have until Oct. 24 to submit comments through a survey or by email.
Once the comment window is closed, the CFIA will review the results and published a report summarizing what it heard.