I'm not so sure. This below is from two days ago:
Early last year, a deer euthanized as part of a study at the Kerr Wildlife Management Area research facility in Texas tested positive for chronic wasting disease — the deer equivalent of the brain disorder called “mad cow” in cattle and “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease” in humans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/ot...planation/ar-AA1mEnwJ?fullscreen=true#image=2
It also might have been a
false positive. Follow-up tests failed to confirm the deer’s infection.
But environmental samples taken through the summer showed diseased prions lurking in feed and water troughs. When wildlife officials live-tested every deer in the herd in October, they turned up another positive. On Nov. 20, they killed all of the roughly 90 deer in the herd, depopulating the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s only deer research facility.
The infection at the Kerr research facility capped off a record year of CWD spread in Texas by raising the same question that has confounded officials since the case count started climbing in 2021: How does the disease keep working its way into new sites, when infected deer aren’t the ones spreading it?
The research facility is double high-fenced to keep the penned deer away from the wild ones roaming the 6,400-acre Kerr Wildlife Management Area outside.
The facility maintained a “closed herd” that did not accept new deer from outside its fences. Researchers working there followed biosecurity protocols that included disinfecting boots and tools and using dedicated on-site vehicles. No deer had yet tested positive for CWD in the county.
“Everybody has been asking, including myself and our staff, how CWD showed up in the deer research facility,” Texas Big Game Director Alan Cain told HuffPost. “And we don’t have a good answer. Everything is just speculation.”
