A white-tailed deer at Penn State’s Deer Research Center has tested positive for chronic wasting disease (CWD), leading to a five-year quarantine of the facility and herd, the college announced this week.

The buck, found dead during a routine daily herd check in March, hadn’t displayed signs of CWD before its death, but staff submitted diagnostic samples to the Pennsylvania Animal Diagnostic Laboratory at Penn State, which detected the disease. The National Veterinary Services Laboratories confirmed the finding on May 5.

The campus is located in University Park, Centre County, in the central part of the state. This isn’t the first CWD detection in the county, where CWD has been detected in wild deer. 

Continuation of research, education in quarantine

The Penn State Department of Animal Science and the Deer Research Center are working with state officials and have imposed a mandated five-year quarantine of the facility and the remaining herd, the news release said. So far, no other deer in the herd have shown signs of CWD.

“The quarantine plan includes strict containment measures, ongoing monitoring and testing, mandatory reporting, comprehensive documentation of herd inventory, and continued sanitization of the facility,” the release said. “In addition, staff are evaluating the potential use of genetic testing to understand individual animals’ susceptibility to CWD better.”

The quarantine plan includes strict containment measures, ongoing monitoring and testing, mandatory reporting, comprehensive documentation of herd inventory, and continued sanitization of the facility.

Since it was established in the 1970s, the Deer Research Center has given students hands-on opportunities to work with deer. The center operates as a closed herd, with no external deer introduced since 1997. The College of Agricultural Sciences is assessing how research activities and educational programming will proceed during quarantine.

CWD is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of cervids (eg, deer, elk, moose) caused by infectious misfolded proteins called prions, which spread from cervid to cervid and through environmental contamination. Prions can persist for years in the environment, and animals may be infected for years—silently spreading the disease—before they show symptoms. No vaccine or treatment is available.

The latest updates from the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) show four avian flu detections in the past week on commercial poultry operations in Indiana and Minnesota.

A commercial breeder facility in Becker County, Minnesota, reported an outbreak among 4,300 birds, which is the second avian flu detection in the county this month. In Indiana, commercial duck facilities in LaGrange and Elkhart counties reported outbreaks involving more than 11,000 birds total.

Overall, in the past 30 days APHIS has confirmed avian flu in 18 flocks, including 11 commercial flocks and seven flocks of backyard birds. A total of 200,000 birds have been affected.

First polar bear detection in Europe

For the first time the avian influenza strain H5N5 has been detected in a polar bear, according to a new report from the Norwegian Veterinary Institute earlier this week.

This is the first detection of avian flu in polar bears in Europe. The one-year-old polar bear and a walrus were found dead in Raudfjorden on Svalbard, an archipelago and territory of Norway between Norway and the North Pole, well north of the Arctic Circle. H5N5 had previously been detected in Svalbard in wild birds, foxes, and walruses.