US tests suggest cattle do not catch deer disease
Date: 09-Aug-02
Country: USA
Author: Judith Crosson
Once an obscure disease, chronic wasting is a brain disease that makes the deer or elk waste away before dying. It has become a major concern for government, hunters and wildlife biologists since being discovered in Wisconsin in February.
The big question is whether it is safe to eat venison or elk meat from the wild or from game farms or whether the disease could be passed to American livestock.
Concerns about the disease spreading and what to tell hunters were the focus of discussion among 450 scientists, government officials and hunting interests from around the United States and Canada who met in Denver this week.
The possible impact on the multi-billion dollar hunting industry has sent shivers through state wildlife agencies. The hunting season gets underway in September in most states.
"SWISS CHEESE"
Jack Ward Thomas, a former U.S. Forest Service chief and now a wildlife conservation professor at the University of Montana, said so far science does not indicate chronic wasting will spread to humans, but officials must produce correct information to avoid misunderstanding and panic. "The specter of 'mad deer' turning the human brain to Swiss cheese is too important to ignore," Thomas told the conference.
Widespread concern hit Europe in the 1990s when scientists linked beef from animals infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or "mad cow disease" to the spread of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has killed more than 100 people, mostly in Britain. No cases of mad cow disease have been detected in cattle herds in the United States.
In the study conducted by the University of Wyoming, Colorado Division of Wildlife, Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the Agricultural Research Service, a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cattle were inoculated in the mouth or placed near infected animals, a scenario that would replicate nature, Williams said.
The animals from the two groups have not shown any indications, although three of 13 cattle inoculated directly in the brain did develop evidence of chronic wasting. "Cattle exposed via more natural routes of exposure have shown no evidence of CWD," Williams said.
The study has 10 more years to go, but the five-year period is important because that is when the disease would start to show up, Williams said.
An area in northeast Colorado and neighboring southeast Wyoming has been a known endemic area for several decades, but wildlife managers were shocked in April when it was discovered the disease had moved westward, across the Continental Divide. Hundreds of elk and deer in Colorado were shot to rein in the disease. Game farms were reimbursed from USDA funds.
The disease has also shown up in Nebraska and South Dakota and most recently in one mule deer in New Mexico.
