chronic wasting disease

Everybody, we're talking with Dan Skinner, who's the Forest Wildlife Program Manager for the state of Illinois, because something pops up on the website, like, and I went, oh, my God.

And I forget to talk about it, but this year in Illinois, we have a mail-in CWD testing kit, right?

We do.

This is our first year.

Kit shows up at your house.

We tell you what samples to take and how to submit them.

And it's got a prepaid return label and all the components there for you to submit your own CWD test result.

Right.

Yeah, so great question, Hallie.

So when we talk about CWD, I don't even know if we've named it yet, but we're talking about chronic wasting disease.

It's a disease in ungulates.

It seems to affect white-tailed deer more so than mule deer and elk, but all three can carry it.

When you compost a body, then it can be within that compost.

And then if you move that to offsite projects, maybe to an area that doesn't currently have CWD or even to an area that does, you can increase the prevalence of it in that area.

And when you're talking about something that's 100 percent fatal, there's a reason that extreme caution is used in that chronic wasting disease is becoming such a concern.

Yeah.

Let's talk people, though, because I have a list.

You know who I was texting the other day? Jay Gregory, because the CWD thing.

He's like calls out all.

I think he thinks that there's podcasters that get paid by state departments to spread CWD propaganda.

I said, not us.

And I said, but if you want a platform to fucking rant about it, I'd love to hear your take because I don't touch the CWD topic because I just don't know.

Right.

You know? But he was cool as fuck.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, or CFIA, is revising its approach to chronic wasting disease in farmed cervids, introducing regional disease classifications, and changing how herd certification relates to disease response measures.

Announced October 22, the changes will take effect January 20, 2027, giving producers and other stakeholders three months to prepare.

Under the new approach, the CFIA will classify CWD as established in Alberta and Saskatchewan, emerging in Manitoba and parts of British Columbia, and not detected in the rest of Canada.

These categories reflect the disease status in wild and farmed cervid populations and will guide federal risk management.

The CFIA says the changes respond to CWD's continued spread into new areas since the national program began in 2019.

The existing program focused on preventing the disease and detecting it early in farmed herds.

Canada Packers reported a loss in its latest quarter as it says it saw a sharp and unusual deterioration in market conditions.