White-tailed deer can get many types of deer diseases. Whether caused by a disease or a virus, some of these ailments can look quite displeasing. A common thing with whitetail is warts. Wart-like growths found on the skin of white-tailed deer and other members of the deer family are fibromas. They are popularly referred to as skin tumors, or simply warts. They are not cancer, but most people imagine cancer as some type of elephant-man like occurrence. Not so. Fibromas, often referred to as deer tumors, can look pretty nasty.

Biologist identify the different skin tumors from deer as papillomas, fibromas, or papillofibromas depending upon the type of tissue making up the tumor. However, there is evidence that skin tumors common to whitetail deer are caused by just one type of virus, the papillomavirus, so the term fibroma will be used to refer to all types of warts and tumors. The disease occurs throughout the whitetail’s range in North America.

Blue Tongue and Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD) are viral diseases that impacts farmed and free-ranging white-tailed deer. Though Blue Tongue and EHD are distinctly different, these diseased are sometimes impossible to tell apart. In fact, blood tests results are very similar. For the sake of this article, Blue Tongue and EHD will be used interchangeably. This disease is found most often in sheep, but Blue Tongue has also been found in other livestock such as cattle and goats and other wild ungualtes such as pronghorn antelope and whitetail deer.

White-tailed deer populations have been dealing with these diseases for years, but deer populations continue to hold strong. Blue Tongue and EHD outbreaks in the U.S. occur in deer almost yearly at southern latitudes. EHD and Blue Tongue are spread by midges such as flies or gnats. These insect vectors spread the disease when they bite deer. As a result, outbreaks are virtually untreatable and typically run a course on an annual basis, although weather conditions impact the duration and severity of the outbreak.