Chronic Wasting Disease—Prion Disease in the Wild.docVIP

Feature Chronic Wasting Disease— Prion Disease in the Wild Steve Bunk I n 1967, mule deer in a research facility near Fort Collins, Colorado, in the United States epidemiologist at Colorado State was ?rst diagnosed in deer east of the Mississippi River, indicating a potential nationwide problem. This year, the USDA is developing a herd certi?cation program to help prevent the movement of infected animals in the game farming industry. This will bolster monitoring already underway in virtually every state, including postmortem examinations of game killed by hunters and by sharpshooters in mass culling operations. University in Fort Collins. He’s been scienti?cally involved with BSE, since it was ?rst discovered among cattle in the United Kingdom in 1986. He recalls predicting that lay interest in BSE would wane after ?ve years. Instead, the disease was found in the mid-1990s to be capable of killing humans who ate tainted beef. “I was wrong, and it really changed my way of thinking, apparently began to react badly to their captivity. At least, that was the guess of researchers working on the natural history and nutrition of the deer, which became listless and showed signs of depressed mood, hanging their heads and lowering their ears. They lost appetite and weight. Then they died—of emaciation, pneumonia, and other complications—or were euthanized. The scientists dubbed it chronic wasting disease (CWD), and for years they thought it might be caused by stress, nutritional de?ciencies, or poisoning. A decade later, CWD was identi?ed as one of the neurodegenerative diseases called spongiform encephalopathies, the most notorious example of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. Nowadays, CWD is epidemic in the United States. Although no proof has yet emerged that it’s transmissible to humans, scienti?c authorities haven’t ruled out the possibility of a public health threat. The media have concentrated on this concern, and