Officials with the Kentucky Dept. of Fish and Wildlife are asking hunters to be on the lookout for two diseases impacting deer and elk herds across the country.
State officials say that with the emergence of both Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and Hemorrhagic Disease, confusion has spread regarding the health of the state’s deer populations.
Chronic Wasting Disease
According to the Kentucky Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, CWD is a neurological disease impacting cervids, a classification of animals that includes deer, elk, and moose. The disease is always fatal once contracted, and has been discovered in 36 states. It was first documented in Kentucky from a wild deer harvested in Ballard County in 2023. That remains the only documented CWD case in a wild deer in the state, though nine captive deer at a Breckenridge County farm tested positive for the disease in October, 2024.
Since the first documented case, state officials have established CWD surveillance zones in 14 western Kentucky counties. Within those zones, hunters are required to follow baiting and feeding restrictions, limit transportation of deer carcasses, and submit a harvested deer’s head for CWD sampling at a designated drop-off site.
For the first time in the agency’s history, Fish and Wildlife also organized a special antlerless deer season within the CWD surveillance zones in late September. Hunters were required to submit deer heads for testing and provide harvest locations.
State wildlife veterinarian Dr. Christine Casey said the special hunt served multiple purposes.
“The goal of that was to help increase our sampling efforts, but also to allow hunters another opportunity to harvest deer outside the typical modern gun season,” Casey said.
From March, 2024 to February, 2025, the agency tested more than 9,000 deer carcasses for CWD. Casey says they rely largely on deer hunter submissions to test deer across the state. There’s currently no viable method to test a live deer for the disease.
She said hunters within CWD surveillance zones are advised to wait until their test results come in to consume the meat of a harvested deer.
“Some are going to be like, ‘I want to get it tested, I want to know.’ Others are like ‘I don’t care.’ And then some are like, if it came back positive they wouldn’t eat it, or they would eat it themselves but not feed it to others. From our perspective, we recommend getting it tested, and then if it tests positive, not to eat it,” Casey said.
While there’s been no known case of CWD spreading to humans, similar prion diseases like Mad Cow Disease have a similar origin.
Hemorrhagic Disease
Casey said outbreaks of Hemorrhagic Disease appear every summer, and are spread by biting midges that infect white-tailed deer populations. She said that while the disease appears every year, large outbreaks occur on a roughly 5-6 year timeline.
“This is definitely more than the average, this is what I would consider one of those larger outbreak years when the perfect storm aligns. We’ve just been really warm and really dry, and those are favorable conditions for the vector, those biting midges,” Casey said. “I’m not surprised, because since 2019 we’re about six years out from our last big outbreak, so that’s typically when we start to see rises in population in terms of an outbreak size.”
As of September 30, Kentucky Fish and Wildlife has received 707 reports with more than 1,400 sick or dead deer related to Hemorrhagic Disease. Those reports span 99 Kentucky counties, primarily in the Bluegrass and Green River regions.
Casey said the highest number of recorded cases occurred in 2017, with more than 1,800 recorded deer killed by the disease.
“It’s not as big as the 2017 outbreak, but it may end up being when all’s said and done. Those reports are based on the total, because usually we get a freeze in November. So, typically our high month is September, and then we start to see it go down in October,” Casey said.
Unlike CWD, Hemorrhagic Disease is not always fatal for the deer, and after contracting it, some will develop an immunity. Populations of the biting midges will largely die off in winter and infection rates will drop until the midges reappear in summer.
“I’ve definitely seen the posts, I know the public is very concerned because there’s a lot of deer. It’s hard for me, because I have the data in front of me and I can look back several years and see that, but I don’t know if people can really look back and remember six years, because so much has happened between now and then,” Casey said. “I get that completely, but it’s on par with other outbreaks we’ve seen in that 5-7 year cycle.”
Casey said that in the case of both Hemorrhagic Disease and CWD, the public is encouraged to report any unusual behavior, unexplained deaths, or visibly sick deer in local herds.
