Originally Posted by super_hunt54

There you go getting circular in your smoke blowing BigTime1. So which is it, No cases of CWD found in the wild or so many it's ridiculous?

I don't believe a singe person in either of these discussions has said that the SOLE reason for CWD outbreaks are because of deer farms. I certainly haven't! What I HAVE said, and several times, is that it is most prevalent in deer farms as well as more easily detected because the deer are behind a fence as well as more testing can be done on them. There's no telling HOW CWD got into Illinois. Just like there is no telling how the disease got started in the first place. It's a misfiring protein with a longevity from hell. One that is slow in action and relatively impossible to pin down in the wild. Some deer have a genetic structure that allow them to slow the process of the prions (most commonly the deer found with it only in their nodes) while others it acts much faster but is STILL a slow killer. It's ALWAYS fatal. Period. Deer will always succumb to it eventually. Some faster, some much slower but if something else doesn't drop them first, it will get them eventually. Unlike on a deer farm, wild deer aren't nose to nose at feeder stations transmitting it to each other like a cold goes through the snot nosed kids at school. ANY disease that happens to be communicable will be more prevalent in a captive situation. In the wild, you will have a deer here, a deer there in most places anyway, there are some where you will see many deer in a small area but in general a disease such as this will be slower spreading because of the way it is transmitted. Whereas EHD is transmitted through other means not requiring the close proximity of the hosts. The problem is, the more deer that become hosts to CWD, then by natural law, the more it is spread. A young buck that has become host to the disease is run off by a dominant, it roams around till it finds a herd of doe without a dominant in close proximity to run it off, bam, new hosts!

You say this disease is doing no harm, yet it is being seen more and more in the wilds. Funny how that works isn't it. It's "doing no harm" yet it's being seen much more nowadays. Not just on deer farms. You ask how did it get into Illinois without deer farms? Well, you can't tell me that people around the Golden Triangle counties didn't purchase some stock to boost their gene lines around there. Business was dropping off a few years ago. Not saying it WAS that but it's a definite possibility. It could have been infected feed. It could have been infected urine. Hell, Michigan and Wisconsin border Illinois, could have been an escapee from one of those farms that had tons of infected deer get loose. Don't try to tell me that whitetail wont travel far either. They TYPICALLY don't but they do at times.

CWD, as stated, is a slow disease and has been around for many many years, but it is a little bit fishy that it wasn't commonly seen in the wild until deer farming became "big business" as you put it. Once the escapes started getting worse, the disease was found in the wild more. Coincidence? COuld be. May not be. Who knows, who really cares. Pointing fingers at who started it isn't going to help a damn thing. Getting a handle on the disease before it really starts to kill off herds is what matters.