State wildlife officials have said they want to eradicate the deer population, estimated at about 25,000 head, within a core three-county area where all of the infected deer were found. In addition, the fall plan will involve testing thousands of deer in a surrounding "management zone" and 500 deer in nearly every other Wisconsin county.

"This statewide testing plan will tell hunters and citizens with 99 percent certainty that the disease does or doesn't exist in the deer population in a given county," Tom Hauge, chief of the department's Bureau of Wildlife Management, said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

"We hope that this level of assurance will reduce some of the anxiety people may have regarding venison and the health of the deer herd in Wisconsin," he said.

Deer hunting has an economic impact in Wisconsin worth about $1.5 billion a year, according to a Department of Natural Resources estimate. State officials have said they intend to closely watch sales of hunting licenses this fall to determine whether interest declines.

CWD is in the same family of illnesses as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. In Europe, at least 125 people have contracted a related, fatal human illness linked to eating beef from infected cows.

CWD has never been shown to infect humans or cattle, but the World Health Organization has advised against eating venison or any part of an animal showing signs of the disease - a fact that has raised questions about venison stored in home freezers across Wisconsin.

The state has called on hunters to help with the testing effort by submitting deer heads for analysis. Wisconsin expanded its fall deer-hunting season and added four week-long summer hunts to reduce the deer population in the core CWD area.

The Department of Natural Resources said it could take up to six months to test all the deer collected. Hunters who submit samples will be able to access the results through an Internet site or a toll-free telephone number, the statement said.

Wisconsin laboratories initially did not have capability to test for CWD, but upgrades planned for the state's main veterinary lab will enable it to test up to 30,000 deer per year, starting this fall, the statement said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Hauge said, "has assured DNR in a letter that certified laboratories in other states will provide the additional testing capacity for our increased statewide sampling."