Five more cases of Chronic Wasting Disease have been found in wild deer in Oneida County.
It brings the total number of detects to 13 since it was first reported in the county in 2018.
A total of 437 deer samples in Oneida County were sent to the Wisconsin DNR for CWD testing last year.
While the disease is popping up more in northern counties in recent years, it’s nowhere near the prevalence seen in southern Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin DNR released a summary of 2025 CWD sampling efforts Wednesday. In total, 17,759 deer were sampled throughout the state during the 2025 hunting seasons with 2,006 samples testing positive. 87% of these detections were in the Southern Farmland Zone.
While there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to how this disease might spread in herds up north, there’s a lot of differences between the northern and southern portions of the state.
“You have different winters, for one. You have different predators and habitat slightly different as well, so we may not see the same expansion that we have in the south as far north as Oneida [County],” said DNR Deer Herd Health Specialist Erin Larson.
Of note with 2025’s positives in Oneida County, one of the deer was harvested in the northwestern portion of the county near Minocqua—all the other detections, so far, have been towards the southeastern part of the county.
Vilas, Lincoln, and Langlade Counties have had positive CWD detections in the past. There were none in those counties this year. Larson did mention the DNR didn’t get as many samples as they were hoping for in Vilas and Langlade Counties. The counties were among the priority areas in the state for the DNR.
CWD is a fatal disease for deer.
A recent study by the Wisconsin DNR shows that in areas where the disease is prevalent, it does suppress deer population growth rates.
Sick deer are also more likely to get in nuisance situations or get hit by a car.
“We have much lower numbers of CWD in the north, and we would like to keep it that way, or at least really slow that spread in that area,” said Larson. “We don't know what the future holds. There could be additional tools that we're able to utilize at some point, and so the longer that we can keep that disease at low levels, the better to be in a position to maybe make a difference with some additional resources in the future.”
Some ways people can help reduce the spread is by not feeding deer. CWD is transmitted directly through animal-to-animal contact, and indirectly through contact with objects or environment contaminated with infectious material (including saliva, urine, feces, and carcasses of CWD-infected animals).
Hunters also play a key role in keeping the spread in check.
“One of the most important things is to just encourage folks to continue to keep hunting and to keep those deer numbers at a good levels for our healthy deer herd overall,” said Larson. “That's one thing nationwide that we're experiencing is there's more hunters that are aging out and less that are coming up. Just trying to encourage folks to keep getting out there and enjoying that recreation of just being able to have your family and your traditions and getting to spend some time in the woods and maybe introducing new folks to hunting.”
Majority of the time, the deer hunters send in for testing have no outwards signs of the disease.
Larson also encourages people to report any deer that look sick or are acting unusual. Emaciation, hanging its head, and hanging around water are common CWD signs.
