Northern Alberta town to host presentation from wildlife disease expert

The County of Barrhead and Barrhead Fish & Game Association will be hosting a special presentation on wildlife disease by Dr. Margo Pybus, one of the province’s top wildlife disease specialists, on Tuesday, October 27.

The County of Barrhead and Barrhead Fish & Game Association will be hosting a special presentation on wildlife disease by Dr. Margo Pybus, one of the province’s top wildlife disease specialists, on Tuesday, October 27.

Anyone is welcome to attend the free event hosted at the Barrhead Senior Drop-in Centre from 5 to 8 p.m., which will feature a live virtual presentation from Pybus who will provide an update on wildlife diseases affecting the local area including Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and the meningeal worm parasite.

Pybus has several decades of experience as the top provincial expert on wildlife disease and is also an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta. She has more than 130 publications and more than 2,000 academic citations according to researchgate.net.

“It’s important to understand how wildlife disease is moving within the area,” said County of Barrhead assistant ag fieldman Chelsea Jaeger.

“The meningeal worm has the potential to cross into domestic livestock such as sheep, alpacas, and llamas, which are quite susceptible to it. It can be good to understand what to watch for and what symptomatic wildlife look like so that you can better be prepared for your herd health.”

CWD is a fatal and contagious neurological disease which affects members of the deer family, with Alberta monitoring the disease since 1998.

The County of Barrhead is on the western edge of Wildlife Management Areas (WMUs) where hunters are required to submit head counts for deer harvested in the region for CWD monitoring purposes in the 2026/27 hunting season. WMUs 505 and 508 encompass areas within the County of Barrhead.

“In Alberta, there’s a big area east of Edmonton and Calgary all down the province where you don’t have to submit your heads anymore, but there’s a lot of places right along the Saskatchewan border they’re still monitoring and they’re starting to move the zones further west to track where CWD is spreading,” noted Jaeger.

“CWD has been in the province for a long time and is kind of new to our area, so I wouldn’t say I’m less concerned with it, but it’s been around. The meningeal worm is quite new and it will have huge impacts on hunting access throughout our zones if it ever gets here because it separates wildlife populations.”

The meningeal worm is more common to white-tailed deer primarily in provinces to the east of Alberta, but the worm was found in Northern Alberta for the first time in several caribou and moose near Cold Lake in 2024.

“This is a worm that’s evolved with whitetail, but it can be detrimental to mule deer populations and moose populations,” said Jaeger.

“It will change how our wildlife population structure is to be more similar to Eastern Canada where they have the worm.”