researchgate.net.<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s important to understand how wildlife disease is moving within the area,\u201d said County of Barrhead assistant ag fieldman Chelsea Jaeger.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe meningeal worm has the potential to cross into domestic livestock such as sheep, alpacas, and llamas, which are quite susceptible to it. It\u00a0can 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
CWD is a fatal and contagious neurological disease which affects members of the deer family, with Alberta monitoring the disease since 1998.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 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,\u201d noted Jaeger.<\/p>\n
\u201cCWD has been in the province for a long time and is kind of new to our area, so I wouldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a worm that’s evolved with whitetail, but it can be detrimental to mule deer populations and moose populations,\u201d said Jaeger.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will change how our wildlife population structure is to be more similar to Eastern Canada where they have the worm.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The County of Barrhead and Barrhead Fish & Game Association will be hosting a special presentation on wildlife…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":937061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[49,48,84],"class_list":["post-937060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=937060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/937061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=937060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=937060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=937060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}