In the middle of a spring afternoon near Lowden-Miller State Forest, Daniel Skinner poured a small pile of dried, yellow corn onto the ground.<\/p>\n
Shouldering his .308 Remington rifle equipped with a thermal scope, he disappeared into a camouflaged ground blind in the middle of a cornfield. For eight hours, he waited for a white-tailed deer to approach the bait, hoping for a clean shot.<\/p>\n
But the deer stayed away. At 10:30 p.m., Mr. Skinner, the forest wildlife manager for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, called an end to the day\u2019s culling and met up with several sharpshooters to compare notes. For that day, the tally was one deer among four groups. The same cull, a year ago, killed 10.<\/p>\n
Over two decades, Illinois has been one of a number of states that have set up culling campaigns to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease, a strange illness that one expert likened to a \u201cdisease from outer space.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou would be hard pressed to come up with a disease, even if you were inventing one from scratch, that would be harder to manage than C.W.D.,\u201d Mr. Skinner said.<\/p>\n
But in mid-April, state officials decided<\/a> to abandon the practice. The disease, they realized, had simply become too widespread.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s harder and harder to throw troops at the front line,\u201d Mr. Skinner said. \u201cWe\u2019ve gone from one county to two counties to over 20 counties, and our staff has not increased twentyfold. We can no longer make a meaningful difference.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018There are no contingency plans\u2019<\/p>\n Chronic wasting disease is a highly contagious, always fatal, rapidly spreading wildlife disease that has bedeviled wildlife managers in North America. It causes the deaths each year, directly or indirectly, of many thousands of white-tailed and mule deer. It infects all cervids \u2014 elk, moose, reindeer and caribou \u2014 and has been detected in at least 36 states, in Canada and in at least a half-dozen other countries.<\/p>\n Nicknamed the zombie deer disease, its symptoms are agonizing. As neurons die, brain function declines, and the animals slowly lose motor ability, resulting in stumbling, drooling and staring.<\/p>\n C.W.D. is one of a small group of known diseases caused not by bacteria, a virus or a fungus, but by a prion, an abnormal cell protein that spreads to normal proteins, which causes them to to misfold, disrupting cell function. <\/p>\n It has never been diagnosed in a human, but experts worry that it will become zoonotic, jumping the species barrier to infect people.<\/p>\n At least one prion disease, bovine spongiform encephalitis (commonly known as mad cow disease), has proved capable of crossing from animals to humans, though human cases have remained extremely rare.<\/p>\n First discovered in wild deer in 1981, chronic wasting disease has been shown to reduce infected deer herds by 3 to 20 percent a year.<\/p>\n The characteristics of prions complicate efforts to contain the disease. They last for years in the soil, absorbed by plants and persisting there.<\/p>\n Researchers are also worried that if the disease spread to species like cattle or hogs, it could endanger the food supply. Mad cow disease caused the deaths of some 230 people and led to a crisis in the cattle industry, as consumers lost confidence in the beef supply and sales collapsed.<\/p>\n A report<\/a> issued last year by 68 of the world\u2019s top experts on the disease urgently called for more funding and better surveillance to keep C.W.D. from contaminating the food supply and infecting humans.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bottom-line message is we are quite unprepared,\u201d said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, which prepared the report. \u201cIf we saw spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans for what to do or how to follow up. It\u2019s a slow-moving disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, criticized Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s proposed budget cutbacks that include eliminating the prion disease surveillance program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Georgia alone has 600,000 hunters, the senator said, and their families would be most vulnerable through contact with infected animals.<\/p>\n Hunters have also been advised to avoid eating the meat of infected animals, even though the disease is mostly found in the brain and spine.<\/p>\n Besides culling, states have taken a variety of approaches to try to curb the disease: lengthening deer hunting season<\/a>; increasing the number of deer that can be killed; requiring carcasses to be destroyed. Some allow more does to be hunted to control herd growth and to reduce the potential for mother-to-offspring transmission<\/a>.<\/p>\n States have also banned the baiting of deer to keep them from gathering and infecting one another.<\/p>\n But so far, there is no known method for eradicating C.W.D.<\/a> in the wild, \u201cand that\u2019s the problem,\u201d Dr. Osterholm said.<\/p>\n The nature of prions may be evolving. <\/strong>For the first time, <\/strong>researchers were able to infect a mouse<\/a> that had been grafted with human cells and tissues to mimic human physiology, Dr. Osterholm said.<\/p>\n Other experts are skeptical that the disease will leap to humans. In her lab, Cathryn Haigh, the chief of the prion cell biology unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Hamilton, Mont., oversaw research that created<\/a> organoids<\/a> from stem cells to mimic human physiology. They then exposed these humanlike tissues to the disease, as a test for whether the disease was likely to jump the species barrier.<\/p>\n \u201cWe literally let them swim in C.W.D. prions,\u201d she said. \u201cThey got the biggest exposure you can imagine tissue getting. They didn\u2019t see any transmission. That suggests a very strong barrier, and in the real world, there are even more barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n The $22 billion question<\/p>\n C.W.D. was first detected in deer in 1967 in captivity in Colorado and then in the wild in 1981, and it has been slowly spreading ever since. In March, it was discovered in two white-tailed deer in Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n Yellowstone National Park wildlife managers became concerned after an infected deer was found there in 2023, threatening tens of thousands of elk, deer and moose in one of the most wildlife-rich areas in the United States.<\/p>\n