Pennsylvania Game Commission Reports

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has made changes to the state’s chronic wasting disease management areas including the creation of a new such area, the expansion of an existing area, and reduction of an existing area.
The new Disease Management Area 8 was created as a response to two recent CWD detections in road-killed deer in Dauphin County. The newly established area includes portions of Dauphin, Lebanon, Northumberland, and Schuylkill counties, and is about 660 square miles in size. This was the first time CWD was detected in free-ranging deer on the east side of the Susquehanna River.

With a little time yet to go in the 2022-23 surveillance year, the Game Commission has already detected chronic wasting disease in more deer this year than the one before, once again highlighting the threat the disease poses to Pennsylvania’s deer and elk, and hunting heritage.
Since July 1, 2022, the Game Commission collected nearly 11,000 CWD samples from deer. Hunter-harvested samples made up the bulk of those, with more than 7,000. To date, a total of more than 400 wild deer tested positive for CWD, 243 of them harvested by hunters.