Health Department seeks Water Quality Advisory Board funds to test for chronic wasting prions

Chronic wasting disease spreads through deer and elk by prions, and those prions can persist in the environment. On Friday, Oct. 16, the Teton County Health Department will ask the Water Quality Advisory Board to fund "Chronic Wasting Disease Environmental Water Quality Monitoring." The board meets at noon in the Public Works conference room at 320 S. King Street agenda. The request comes up first as a discussion item. A later action item calls for the board to make a funding recommendation. The agenda links to the proposal but does not include it, so the amount, the sampling sites and the testing method are not in the public record. The board's agenda lists no earlier funding action on this request.

The Teton District Board of Health heard an update on "chronic wasting disease surveillance" as a new Health Department initiative on July 21 Board of Health agenda. The town's 2026 Ecosystem Health Indicator Report rates the spread of the disease locally as "moderate." Elk prevalence is under 1 percent, but deer prevalence is 1.76 percent, above the report's target of less than 1 percent indicator report. That report traces the disease locally to a mule deer in 2018 and an elk in Grand Teton National Park in December 2020. It names "environmental contamination" as one route of transmission. The proposal still has to show which water bodies it would sample and whether current methods can reliably detect prions in water.