Martinsville Bulletin, Inc.
P. O. Box 3711
204 Broad Street
Martinsville, Virginia 24115
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A deer is seen in the Mulberry Road area of Martinsville recently. |
Thursday, October 4, 2007
By DEBBIE HALL - Bulletin Staff Writer
Deer in Henry County and surrounding areas are dying from what game officials believe is Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (HD), a common viral infection that affects white-tailed deer.
Jim Bowman, a wildlife biologist with the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), said outbreaks typically occur in late summer and early fall each year and “usually taper off when we get a frost.”
Deer infected with the disease are safe to eat, with one exception, according to Matt Knox, a deer biologist with the VDGIF.
Some deer suffering with the disease develop bacterial infections, and those animals should not be eaten, Knox said.
Hunters can identify those deer by sores or abscesses, commonly on the knees or the “brisket” (front of the chest), Knox said.
Those areas are more prone to the sores than others because infected deer “walk on their knees” and look almost as if they are sliding across the ground because their hooves often are too tender to walk on, Knox said.
The bacterial infection, however, is uncommon, he said.
“If you had about 100 deer get sick, you’d see an abscess on just a couple” of animals, he added.
Although the bacterial infection is unusual, outbreaks of Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease are common.
“What’s uncommon about it this year is where it’s happening,” Knox said.
Usually, the disease is prevalent in the Tidewater region of Virginia, he said. “It is less common in the Piedmont” and rarely is found west of the Blue Ridge.
That has not been the case this year, Knox said.
Bowman added that even in areas where the disease is common, “every three or four years, it spikes. This year, we’re experiencing that spike.”
The virus is transmitted by insects, officials said. It cannot be spread by direct contact between infected animals.
Even if they are bitten by a gnat, the disease poses no threat to humans or domestic pets such as dogs and cats, according to the VDGIF.
Some deer survive HD, according to Knox, and game officials use data collected from deer hooves to help estimate the number of survivors by using the coronary band (in humans it is the white, half-moon located at the base of nails).
In deer, the band is located on hooves, and “basically, hooves are toenails,” Knox said.
Because deer infected with HD “get a red hot burning fever, the fever is so hot” it kills the coronary band in hooves, and a ridge becomes apparent in the hoof, Knox said.
Hooves bear scars of the infection for weeks or months after the disease has run its course, Knox said.
Hunters in areas where the disease is common often refer to the ridge as “sloughing hooves,” he added.
And “when a hunter sees that on a deer, they know the deer had this disease back in the fall,” Knox said.
If the disease is fatal, death is often quick, according to the VDGIF.
In the one report the department received from Henry County, eight deer were reported dead in the Philpott Lake area, Bowman said.
He expects the number of reports of dead deer to rise when hunters take to the woods later this fall.
While the disease “can be locally important in terms” of its impact on the deer herd, “it usually is not,” Bowman said.
Even in Allegheny County, where more than 50 deer were reported dead by mid-August, Bowman said, the deaths have had “little if any impact on the deer herd.”
Currently, other states across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic also are experiencing outbreaks of the disease, according to the VDGIF.
Since late July, wildlife biologists and conservation police officers with the VDGIF have investigated reports of possible outbreaks from Allegheny, Shenandoah, Nelson, Essex, Bedford, Scott and Hanover counties.
Lenny Belcher of Axton farms property on Blue Knob Mountain and said he has found about 15 dead deer within the past two and a half or three months.
In the Axton area, Belcher said, he has seen or heard reports of dead deer “from Robertson’s Store all the way back to (Virginia) 628, across (Virginia) 57. ... That’s a three- or four-mile radius ... spread over a bunch of farms,” he said.
Most carcasses he has seen were near water, and Belcher suspects the high temperature spurs the sick deer to seek water, and “they go to water and die.”
Infected deer also may behave oddly, Belcher said, and may “start acting strange, like they’re not real scared” of humans. Because of the high fever, “I reckon they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Belcher is an avid hunter, and “I usually eat a pile of deer,” he said. But one thing is certain: “I’m not going to eat it now.”
Knox said the disease is so common that avid hunters likely have eaten venison from a deer that survived the disease.
“They just didn’t know it,” he said. |
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