EAST LANSING, Mich — According to the State of Michigan, bovine tuberculosis (bTB) is one of the oldest diseases known to man. That means trying anything new to eradicate it in our wild deer populations is worth a shot.
"It's got human health issues, potentially, It's got economic issues with the, with the livestock industry, and then certainly, it has, you know, wildlife implications," Henry 'Rique" Campa, III, Ph.D at MSU told me in his office in East Lansing. "You know, you have to, you have to be creative with techniques."
TB has been consistently present in the free-ranging white-tailed deer around Alpena County for about 30 years And after years of collaborative research, MSU, the DNR, and USDA are currently running a field study on private land in Alpena County for a new way to deliver the commonly used TB vaccine Bacillus Calmette Guerin.
Michigan Bovine TB Zones Map - Courtesy Michigan.gov by WXMI on Scribd
"The process is that the vaccine is actually in a gel sphere, in a liquid, and then that sphere is put into the middle of that alfalfa food product matrix, and then put in the field," said Campa.
Think of it like a very advanced version of giving your dog a pill hidden in cheese— Except the pill has to remain liquid... you couldn't touch your dog... and your dog was a wild animal.
The team places these Vaccine Delivery Units on about 15 sites then several weeks later the USDA will harvest deer in the area under DNR-issued permits and collect samples to see if this new way of tackling the problem will work.
"You have to be creative with techniques, you are not going to trap deer and give them a shot and release them," added Campa. "It's just too labor-intensive, I've trapped a lot of deer on other projects and it's just not a very effective management technique."
With deer populations on the rise, and hunter numbers on the decline across Michigan, having another tool in the toolbelt for disease management is crucial.
"Both from a human perspective, you know, from a wildlife perspective, from a, from an agriculture perspective, but also a tool that maybe other people can use in other states and in other countries down the road to tackle maybe, disease issues we don't know about," said Campa.
Now, I know what you are probably thinking because I was thinking about it too. What does this mean for us hunters?
"What's most important for us to just really make sure people know that two things, one, that this vaccine is something that has been used for, you know, over 100 years, it is the, you know, most widely used and safest safe vaccine globally," Wildlife Health Specialist with the DNR Emily Sewell told me. "And then, this is such a small field trial, 15 sites that are, you know, 20 by 50 meters. It's not a whole crop field, it's just a small spot on the crop fields, about 15 of those little spots on the landscape. It's a very focused, very small field trial, which in no means trying to vaccinate deer at a landscape scale.
"One of the collaborators on this project before we went into the field, we did two years of penned deer research out in Ames, Iowa, directed by Dr. Mitch Palmer, with USDA Agricultural Research Services. And Dr. Palmer has spent the majority of his career doing TB-related research. And some of the penned deer research he did before this project, and we talked to the DNR before this, before we even went out in the field is that BCG, the vaccine that we're using, does not accumulate muscle tissue. You know, he's done significant research with it, and that was an important part of our decision to even try it out in the field," Campa told me.
"The second part of it is, you know, it's like any vaccine, it kind of, you know, metabolizes out of this system over time," Campa added. "So, you get vaccinated, it takes a while for it to get into your system. And then over time, its efficacy decreases over time. Versus if you have an animal that's TB positive with M. Bovis, that it's virulent, you know, it's, it's not kind of going away, it's thriving. And so, you know, hunters that would be maybe concerned about an animal that was vaccinated in March, in October, or November it's not going to show up in a nice, meat tissue. And so, it shouldn't be a concern."
Emily added that the DNR will be releasing the findings from the pilot program when the department gets the preliminary results back before the start of deer hunting season.
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