Chronic wasting disease found in Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park announced this week that a mule deer buck inside the park’s borders has tested positive for chronic wasting disease. The detection is a first for the park, which has previously managed to dodge the always-fatal disease despite its presence in the three states that neighbor Yellowstone.

In a Tuesday press release, the park said that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department tested the carcass of a radio-collared mule deer that died in the southeastern section of the park near Yellowstone Lake. The release notes that there’s “no effective strategy to eradicate [CWD] once it’s established” and its plan in the wake of the detection is to ramp up monitoring to determine how prevalent the disease is within the park.

CWD causes physiological and behavioral changes in infected cervids and ultimately leads to emaciation and death. It’s a transmissible, progressive neurological disease similar to mad cow disease, which jumped the species barrier in the mid-1990s, leading to the deaths of 176 Britons who developed a variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a slow-acting degenerative brain disorder.