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Wasting Disease Forum Examines Research

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 July 2005, 00:00 CDT

MADISON, Wis. - Some attendees of a symposium about chronic wasting disease said the condition spread to New York this spring has brought a renewed sense of urgency to the disease.

"It had many of us at this symposium feeling unsettled," said Ira New Breast, executive director of the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society in Denver. It aids American Indian tribes in testing for the disease on tribal lands.

New Breast and about 375 scientists, researchers and wildlife managers were in Madison from Tuesday through Thursday for an international symposium on CWD, a neurological disease that attacks the nervous system in deer and elk.

They focused on the latest studies targeting the disease and its impacts on wild and captive herds, on humans and the environment.

Chronic wasting disease was first spotted in Colorado in the late 1960s, and didn't appear east of the Mississippi River in a wild herd until 2002 in Wisconsin. Since then, it has been found in Illinois and, most recently in New York, where cases were detected in the spring.

The disease has not been found in West Virginia's deer herd. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources is seeking public comment on proposed rules to establish minimum standards for captive deer facilities because of concerns that captive animals could expose the state's wild deer population to the disease.

"We're playing catch-up because the disease is chronic in nature," New Breast said. "We're as much as one to two years behind the expansion of the disease."

Studies from the Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan to a desert basin in New Mexico are confirming that the disease spreads from animal to animal, most likely through infectious proteins in the soil. It also does not appear to be spread to humans or cattle and managing the disease brings challenges that vary from state to state.

Bryan Richards, chronic wasting disease project leader at the National Wildlife Health Center of the U.S. Geological Survey in Madison, said the symposium's goal was to attempt to give attendees "the most complete three-day education" about the disease.

"We know much more about CWD as opposed to three years ago, but there is still more we need to know," Richards said.

Source: Charleston Gazette, The

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