BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Two Louisiana scientists have a three-year grant to study two viral diseases that are spread by midges and cause bleeding in deer and cattle.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture is providing $490,000 to Lane Foil and Claudia Husseneder of the LSU AgCenter.

They'll study bluetongue virus and epizootic (EP-ih-zoh-AH-tik) hemorrhagic (HEM-ohr-AJ-ik) disease. Both often kill deer but are less dangerous to cattle. Foil says both "can cause devastating losses in captive deer herds."

An AgCenter news release Wednesday said that in ca...