Background: Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a contagious, fatal prion disease affecting cervids in a growing\nnumber of regions across North America. Projected deer population declines and concern about potential spread of\nCWD to other species warrant strategies to manage this disease. Control efforts to date have been largely unsuccessful,\nresulting in continuing spread and increasing prevalence. This systematic review summarizes peer-reviewed published\nreports describing field-applicable CWD control strategies in wild deer populations in North America using systematic\nreview methods. Ten databases were searched for peer-reviewed literature. Following deduplication, relevance\nscreening, full-text appraisal, subject matter expert review and qualitative data extraction, nine references were\nincluded describing four distinct management strategies.\nResults: Six of the nine studies used predictive modeling to evaluate control strategies. All six demonstrated one\nor more interventions to be effective but results were dependant on parameters and assumptions used in the\nmodel. Three found preferential removal of CWD infected deer to be effective in reducing CWD prevalence; one\nmodel evaluated a test and slaughter strategy, the other selective removal of infected deer by predators and the\nthird evaluated increased harvest of the sex with highest prevalence (males). Three models evaluated non-selective\nharvest of deer. There were only three reports that examined primary data collected as part of observational studies.\nTwo of these studies supported the effectiveness of intensive non-selective culling; the third study did not find a\ndifference between areas that were subjected to culling and those that were not. Seven of the nine studies were\nconducted in the United States.\nConclusions: This review highlights the paucity of evaluated, field-applicable control strategies for CWD in wild deer\npopulations. Knowledge gaps in the complex epidemiology of CWD and the intricacies inherent to prion diseases\ncurrently pose significant challenges to effective control of this disease in wild deer in North America.
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