Inside the fight against ‘zombie deer disease,’ scientists confront changing politics ...Middle East

BATON ROUGE, La. — In what looks like a souped-up high school chemistry lab, with high-tech equipment and carefully labeled specimen jars, Mariano Carossino points to a piece of deer brain.

He and the lab technicians select samples of brain stem and lymph nodes donated by hunters to test for chronic wasting disease, the infection spreading fast among deer, elk and moose nationwide. 

The small, squishy pieces of organs are taken from a medical sample container and examined by lab technicians with long metal tweezers to make sure they are intact enough to be tested for disease. The samples are encased in wax before being thinly sliced and colored with ink. 

Under a microscope, Carossino, a pathologist at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, and the lab techs at the Louisiana Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory can tell whether the deer was diseased, alerted to the problem by little pink dots visible microscopically on their computer monitor.

“You can kind of tell from eyesight, but you really want to look at it microscopically because you can’t always see everything from the eye,” said Carossino. “If there’s red color in the right areas of the tissue, then the result will be a positive detection.”

Chronic wasting disease, sometimes known as “zombie deer disease,” has no cure. It has spread into 36 states, including northern parishes of Louisiana, 18 counties in Mississippi (most in the northern most part of the state) and five Canadian provinces since it was first detected in captive deer in the 1960s and in the wild in the 1980s. It has also been detected in deer farm herds in South Korea and among wild reindeer and moose in Scandinavia.

Detecting the disease is essential for containment efforts. Carossino  works in the diagnostic lab to test for cases of the illness in individual deer. 

The lab housed at LSU, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network, is one of 31 in the country approved to test for chronic wasting disease. During hunting season, the lab tests up to 120 samples a day, working in rotating 12-hour shifts, testing cases from across the Southeast. 

When a case comes up positive, it spurs wildlife officials into action to try to contain the spread.

According to to the CWD Alliance, as of Oct. 16, 2025, there have been 447 positive tests since 2018 in Mississippi. About 270,000 deer are harvested each year in the state from a deer population estimated at 1.75 million, according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service.

Many states, including Louisiana, have adopted policies aimed at stopping healthy deer from coming into contact with infected deer and environments. But those efforts could soon be dialed back at the will of state legislators, worrying scientists who study the disease and its expansion. 

It’s the latest sign of rising antagonism toward practices meant to stop the spread of chronic wasting disease. Because the illness is not thought to be contagious to humans, some argue that efforts to control it have gone too far.

In Missouri, the state’s top wildlife official had to suspend culling of deer in areas rife with the disease. He issued an open letter pledging to work with hunters and landowners on a new approach.

Meanwhile, researchers working in Illinois have found hunters in counties where chronic wasting disease is prevalent are less likely to say the disease poses a risk. They also put less trust in wildlife officials.

Even Ted Nugent, ‘70s rockstar turned conservative activist, got involved in the political squall of chronic wasting disease as a representative of the libertarian hunting rights group Hunter Nation. 

“I’ve had enough of CWD and the one-size-fits-all rules that come with it,” Nugent said in a prerecorded video played during a Louisiana legislative committee meeting. “The left and the misinformed have used CWD scare tactics for far too long to purposely destroy our hunting lifestyle and heritage.”

How is chronic wasting disease spread? 

The signs of an outbreak of chronic wasting disease often start with deer, elk and other cervids infected with this contagious illness looking starved, disoriented and drooling excessively.

They excrete the proteins that cause the disease, known as prions, into the environment. Healthy deer that come into contact with infected deer or prions are likely to catch the disease as well. It always results in death. 

“It’s a misfolded protein that the cell machinery cannot turn over,” said Carossino. “The cell starts to malfunction, and this is when the disease develops.”

In Louisiana, baiting and feeding deer are generally legal, but wildlife officials have marked areas where the disease has been detected as “enhanced mitigation zones,” There, baiting and feeding are not allowed to prevent healthy deer from being drawn to infected areas.

“Prions concentrate in the saliva, which is one of the more infectious bodily fluids, so bait piles can quickly become hotspots for transmission,” said Noelle Thompson, a wildlife health specialist and chronic wasting disease researcher based in the Western United States. 

Thompson said prions also remain infectious in the soil for years, if not decades, so even if bait piles and food plots are removed, the area can still pass on disease to healthy creatures for a long time. 

“Once you do detect an animal, the landscape has probably been contaminated for at least many months, more likely years, and you’re just now playing catch up,” said Mark Zabel, a professor with the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Previously in Louisiana, officials within the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and its regulatory commission could restrict baiting and feeding in land adjacent to the control areas where no disease has yet been detected  — labeled as “buffer zones.” This was done at officials’ discretion, generally based on advice from scientists involved with tracking the disease. 

But this is now changing.

Political pushback

A resolution in the Louisiana Senate changed control areas to be based more on disease prevalence, rather than proximity.  

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries will now establish management zones within five and 15 miles from a confirmed case of chronic wasting disease discovered during annual surveillance seasons.

From July 1 to June 30, the department will collect samples from dead deer to check for the disease, with up to 300 deer to be tested. If sampling points to disease levels in less than 2.5% of the area’s population, baiting and feeding will be allowed.

If the rate is higher than 2.5%, state officials can restrict baiting and feeding in the 5- and 15-mile zones for future surveillance seasons. And, if disease prevalence is higher than 20% of the projected population, baiting and feeding is allowed. 

Meanwhile, another measure would legalize the rehabilitation of injured or orphaned white-tailed deer in the state. 

An advocate for the rehabilitation bill, Louisiana resident Kimberly Graham, told lawmakers the story of a fawn she kept after she’d found its mother had been hit by a car. Graham named the fawn Baby Belle. 

But when state Wildlife and Fisheries agents found out she’d kept it, Baby Belle was euthanized, in accordance with law and internal policy against keeping white-tailed deer in captivity.

“When the baby was thriving under my care, wildlife agents came to me, confiscated and killed her,” Graham said during a legislative committee meeting. “It broke my heart, and this just can’t continue.”

The deer rehabilitation bill includes specific provisions to try to protect against the spread of chronic wasting disease, bringing state officials tentatively on board with the legislation. 

But, when paired with the large changes to the way chronic wasting disease is contained, experts are concerned. 

Disease steadily spreads

The first case of chronic wasting disease was detected in Louisiana in 2022. Since then, it has slowly but steadily crept across the state, with just over 50 cases detected in four parishes in the northern part of the state. 

Thompson said that allowing the rehabilitation of white-tailed deer “will certainly increase geographic spread of CWD” and goes against best management practices for containing the disease, like those the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies published in 2018.

“It is just harder to detect the disease in fawns,” said Thompson, adding that there are more studies emerging to show that mother deer can more commonly pass chronic wasting disease to their babies than previously thought.   

Zabel said that deer with the disease have an increased likelihood of being hit by cars or injured “because they get disoriented.”

“You could have that fawn be positive but not showing any symptoms,” said Zabel, “It’s highly likely that, even if they are infected, they’re not going to show any signs” for up to one year. 

In the rehabilitation bill, deer suspected of having chronic wasting disease would need to be reported, euthanized and sent for testing. In the case of a positive result, any other deer being rehabilitated at the same facility would also need to be put down, with the rehab unable to take on any deer cases in the future.

Zabel recommended adding testing of urine, blood or feces samples taken from seemingly infected live deer. These are less definitive than lymph node or brain tissue tests but at least act as some sort of mechanism to prevent the disease from spreading, he said.

“It’s likely that it’s OK that you’re rehabilitating these animals, especially orphaned animals, but if there’s any way to do at least some kind of testing before they’re released, that would be good,” said Zabel. 

“These are all considerations everybody across the country dealing with CWD has to consider,” he added.

Zabel said he understands the attempt to reach a compromise among the hunting industry, wildlife rehab advocates, scientists and state officials. But the disease won’t stop spreading while they look for middle ground, and Zabel warned that the changes won’t help.

“In five or 10 years, they’re gonna look back and say, ‘Oh man. Yeah, this didn’t work.’”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. 

Mississippi Today contributed to this report.

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