By John Weiss
Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN 

PINE ISLAND -- Lauren Heller waited patiently Saturday to practice her skill with scalpel and words, and help find out if a deadly disease is in wild deer around Pine Island.

The Pine Island woman is a University of Minnesota veterinary student who is helping the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources take lymph nodes from deer that hunters register. The glands will be tested for chronic-wasting disease. It has been found in wild deer in Wisconsin and in four elk in pens in Pine Island but never in wild deer in Minnesota.

The DNR is trying to make sure that if there is an outbreak, it can respond quickly, said Mike Tenney, assistant DNR area wildlife supervisor who was with Heller, Steve Kittelson, a DNR shallow-lakes expert and Anthony Braulick, a U of M vet student from Minneapolis.

They were at one of 26 CWD check stations set up throughout this region for the firearms deer season, which opened Saturday. The stations are expected to be open for the next three weekends. Hunters will be notified by late December if their deer tested positive. So far, the 30,000 deer checked over the past several years have all been negative, Tenney said.

The DNR cut back on testing in recent years because no disease was found but planned to increase it more this year, he said. But he added: "The existence of it (CWD) here did trigger us to have a more intense push."

Heller was happy to help with testing. They had 12 hunters stop by dusk Saturday at the Pine Island Cenex station.

"This is a break from the classroom all day long," Heller said. She wants to work with large animals like cows and horses and the testing let her try out her scalpel skills. Her goal was to cut through the hide, get the little gland that looks a bit like a small oyster, and use only one scalpel.

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