Wasting Illness May Travel via Game Farms
The first U.S. mad cow was diagnosed just last year, but
for more than 30 years, deer in certain parts of this
country are known to have been afflicted by a similar fatal
neurological ailment called chronic wasting disease (CWD).
Twenty years ago, the same illness was diagnosed in elk.
In the past nine years, possibly as a consequence of game
farm practices, CWD in deer and elk has spread from two
states to 10 more and two Canadian provinces. Hunters in
certain areas now are being urged to have their deer and
elk kills tested.
For 30 years, CWD in the wild was centered in portions of
northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming. Since 1997, it
has turned up in the wild in Nebraska, South Dakota,
Wisconsin, Illinois, New Mexico, Utah and Saskatchewan,
too.
Game farms also have had the disease appear, and many
suspect that animal sales between farms, as well as
escapees, helped transport the disease.
From 1996 to 2002, CWD was discovered on game farms in
Saskatchewan, Alberta, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota,
Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota. Overall,
there are about 12,000 deer and elk farms in the U.S. and
Canada.
Several years ago, three young people — two hunters
and one woman who ate venison hunted by her father —
died of the human form of CWD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
(pronounced Croytz-feld Yawkob), and scientists are
wondering if humans could be infected by eating venison
from sick deer or elk.
The jury’s out on this all-important question, though
research is ongoing. Dr. Patrick Bosque, a neurologist with
the hospital Denver Health, has been studying CWD for many
years. He says, “The most prudent assumption is that, at
some low rate, if enough people consume enough
chronic-wasting-disease meat, some people might get a
chronic-wasting-like disease. But we really don’t know for
sure.”
Is Venison Safe to Eat?
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), scrapie, mad cow and the human Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease are Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies or TSEs, in which a normal brain cell protein called “the prion protein” builds up in a misfolded form that kills nerve cells.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob symptoms are similar to Alzheimer’s, and include memory loss and depression, followed by rapidly progressive dementia and death, usually within a year after symptoms appear. The lag time between contracting the disease and death is not yet known.
Although Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is rare, the deaths of three young people from the disease caught the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because all three — two hunters, from Utah and Oklahoma, and a woman from Maine who ate hunted venison as a child — were younger than 30 when they first displayed symptoms. The median age at death from Creutzfeldt-Jakob is 68.
Dr. Patrick Bosque of the hospital Denver Health says humans have about a 1-in-15,000 lifetime chance of contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob. He doesn’t think humans are highly susceptible to CWD, citing the disease’s presence in portions of Colorado and Wyoming for more than 30 years, with untold numbers of CWD-infected deer and elk consumed by hunters and their friends and family during that time.
Research by Denver Health and Colorado State University hasn’t detected an increase in Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases in northeastern Colorado, either, something Bosque says would occur if humans were even moderately susceptible to chronic wasting.
“On the other hand,” he says, “if you look at the situation in England, people aren’t very susceptible to mad cow, either.”
Bosque says humans most at risk of contracting mad cow and CWD have some genetic predisposition to the diseases — a predisposition not yet understood. “That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t hunt deer,” he says, “but they probably should get it tested. I wouldn’t eat an animal from an area with chronic wasting disease unless it had been tested.”
By 2003 in North America, nearly all states and provinces had at least some testing for CWD available, though the tests are not considered 100-percent accurate.
First, Mad Sheep
Nearly 300 years ago, European herders noticed a new
affliction among their sheep. Some of the animals suddenly
would become disorientated and nervous, grind their teeth
and bite at their legs and feet. Many displayed a maddening
itch, rubbing themselves bloody against fence posts. Within
six months, they would stop eating and die. Herders dubbed
the disease “scrapie.”
Today, microscopic examination of scrapie-infected sheep
brains reveals the calling card of this family of diseases:
extremely tiny ruptures or holes in the brain cells.
Imagine a normal, solid section of brain cells and, next to
it, a scrapie-infected section that looks strangely
swiss-cheesed. Both mad cow (bovine spongiform
encephalopathy or BSE) and CWD have this similar abnormal
brain-cell pathology.
In 1977, Elizabeth Williams, a graduate student in
veterinary medicine, discovered these miniscule holes; in
1980, she published her findings. Williams was trying to
figure out why deer and elk were dying at the Foothills
Wildlife Research Facility, now operated by the Colorado
Division of Wildlife, near Fort Collins, Colo.
In the 1960s, Foothills and three similar Colorado research
facilities had embarked on several studies involving wild
deer and elk; when the projects were completed, the animals
were released back into the wild.
Soon after the studies began, however, the deer began dying
from a mysterious ailment. Many slobbered excessively,
became listless and stopped interacting with other animals.
Some would tremble and become uncoordinated. Usually, they
would grow emaciated and waste away, their ribs protruding
painfully before they died.
The area encompassing Foothills also was home to sheep with
scrapie, which has existed in North America since 1947;
some researchers think scrapie from the sheep was
contracted by the deer and elk. Michael Miller, a Colorado
Division of Wildlife veterinarian at the Foothills
facility, says the disease may have existed in the wild
even earlier, and then spread from infected animals brought
in for study to the closely confined captive animals. Other
experts say not enough proof exists to support either idea.
Williams, now a professor of veterinary science at the
University of Wyoming and a leading CWD researcher, says
today the disease is present in “about 40,000 square miles
of Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming. The known CWD-affected
area took a big jump in 2002-2003, moving farther to the
west and north in Wyoming.” And the rate of infection is
picking up, too, Williams says. Tests done in the 1980s in
Colorado estimated less than 1 percent of elk and 2 percent
or less of deer had CWD; today, in pockets of Colorado and
Wyoming, the average infection rate in deer is 7 percent to
8 percent and, in a few areas, more than 15 percent have
tested positive.
Captive Victims
According to Valerius Geist, professor emeritus of
environmental science at the University of Calgary, there
is no more efficient way to spread a wildlife disease than
by transporting infected animals to disease-free areas. A
respected wildlife biologist and author of numerous books
on deer and elk biology, Geist says the trade in game farm
animals has spread CWD into the wild across North America.
“Deer are notorious for getting in and out of these farms,”
he says, noting fences fall down or are breached by severe
weather, and gates are left open. At fence lines, wild
animals can have nose-to-nose contact with their fenced-in
counterparts.
Game farm animals also are confined at much higher
concentrations than in the wild, Geist says, and this
concentration allows diseases like chronic wasting to
magnify. In the 1990s, he adds, game-farmed elk introduced
another disease, bovine tuberculosis, into Canadian cattle
and other animals, a development that has cost Canadian
taxpayers and consumers millions of dollars.
In 1996, Saskatchewan discovered its first game farm animal
with CWD, an elk. By 2001, the province had 29 game farms
under quarantine, and eventually, nearly 8,000 elk were
slaughtered, more than 100 of which tested positive for
CWD.
George Luterbach, chief veterinarian for the western branch
of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and one researcher
involved in the elk situation, says, “We think we traced
back most of the chronic wasting disease exposures to a
single elk from South Dakota.” Later, CWD was found on the
South Dakota farm where the elk was raised. Luterbach says
he thinks this single South Dakota elk brought the disease
to the first infected Saskatchewan game farm, that then
distributed the disease into other game farm operations
through buying and selling animals.
In 2000, Saskatchewan also recorded its first wild deer
with CWD, and Darrel Rowledge, director of a Calgary
conservation group called the Alliance for Public Wildlife,
says it was no coincidence that CWD was found in the wild a
few years after being confirmed on game farms. Given that
the prions (misfolded, nerve cell-killing proteins) that
cause CWD are very difficult to destroy and the disease is
always fatal, historical and scientific records should
reveal a pre-1960 presence in the wild in North America,
but they don’t. So, Rowledge says, the disease was
localized in Colorado until infected game farm animals
dispersed it more widely.
‘Scientists knew that privatization, domestication and
commercialization of wildlife were going to cause
horrendous disease problems,” Rowledge says, “but many
state legislatures and agricultural agencies legalized game
farms in the 1970s and 1980s, anyway. There was this
presumption that [game farmers] should be allowed to exist
until it was proven that they were doing something wrong.”
Marching East
In February 2002, Wisconsin shocked the wildlife world when
its Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced that
three deer killed by hunters the previous November had
tested positive for CWD. This was the first known incidence
of the disease east of the Mississippi River.
The three animals were killed near Mount Horeb, in
southwestern Wisconsin, about 20 miles west of Madison, the
state capital. Wisconsin subsequently embarked on a plan to
kill off as many deer as possible in the surrounding
960-square-mile area. Since then, Wisconsin has identified
320 infected deer, most killed and tested during
deer-hunting seasons. Just south of the Wisconsin border in
Illinois, 30 more infected deer were identified between
November 2002 and December 2003.
No one knows for sure how CWD jumped over 800 miles, from
Colorado to Wisconsin. But, according to DNR secretary
Scott Hassett, several possibilities exist, including
infected deer [being] brought into the Mount Horeb area and
released; infected deer escaping from a deer farm;
hunter-harvested deer brought back from the West and
carcass remains being left on the landscape; and CWD prions
fed to wild deer in deer food or mineral blocks. “People
would have been unaware that CWD was present in all of the
above scenarios,” Hassett says, “yet these situations all
have something in common — a human activity that
poses the risk of unknowingly introducing a devastating
disease.”
At the time CWD was discovered in the state, more than 700
Wisconsin deer and elk farms were holding more than 16,000
animals. A 2000 series of investigative reports by this
writer in the Madison, Wis., weekly newspaper, Isthmus,
revealed some of those farms had imported more than 350 elk
from game farms in Western states where CWD is found in the
wild or from other farms with ties to game farms where
stock had tested positive for the disease.
In September 2003, a deer with CWD was identified on a
Wisconsin game farm, and by January of this year, 16
Wisconsin game farms were under CWD quarantines.
Victims in Every Arena
“We were always certain that the science would show we are
not the source of this problem, that we are as much a
victim of this disease as anyone else,” says Gary Nelson,
who owns a deer farm near Fence, Wis. Nelson also is
president of the Whitetails of Wisconsin Association, an
industry group that represents 200 of the state’s 487 deer
farmers. Another 350 Wisconsin game farmers raise elk or
exotic deer. (Game farms raise deer and elk for paid
hunting, meat and antler velvet, which is sold to exotic
markets.)
Nelson says Wisconsin game farmers very much wanted to keep
chronic wasting out of the state, and worked with Wisconsin
agricultural officials to devise a CWD program four years
ago. That program was put into effect under emergency
authority after CWD was found in the state and is now
standard operating procedure for all Wisconsin game
farmers. Among the regulations, every dead deer or elk that
leaves a game farm must be tested, no matter how it died.
He says game farms could have introduced CWD to Wisconsin,
but the vast majority of infected animals — more than
300 — have been found in the wild. Less than 20
infected deer and elk out of nearly 6,000 tested since 2002
have been discovered on Wisconsin game farms. “Yes, we have
it on game farms,” he says, “but if it originated here, we
would’ve discovered it rampant on Wisconsin game farms. And
we haven’t.”
Elk appear the least susceptible to CWD, with mule deer
(Western cousin of the white-tailed deer) next, followed by
the white-tails, which are considered the most susceptible
and the most responsible for spreading the illness. The
exact route of infection between animals isn’t known, but
Colorado’s Miller says it appears to be introduced orally.
The possibility is that infected deer and elk somehow
“shed” infected prions, passing them on to other animals
through activities like feeding together, touching noses or
stepping in each others’ feces and urine. Currently, most
scientists say the disease is fatal.
Management By Eradication
In Wisconsin, with deer densities of up to 70 animals per
square mile, wildlife officials worry CWD could devastate
the entire herd. Initially, the Wisconsin DNR wanted to
eradicate all deer in the area with the disease; then, the
agency shifted to a more practical, massive reduction
effort via increased hunting. The aim is to slow the spread
of infection.
Yet many Wisconsin citizens oppose the DNR’s plan. One
group, called CAIDS or Citizens Against Irrational Deer
Slaughter, argues the mass kill plan is worse than the
disease itself. The group has enlisted landowners willing
to prohibit hunting on their properties for the cause.
Veterinarian John Barnes, a CAIDS organizer, says many
healthy deer will be slaughtered needlessly. Barnes also
thinks a deer kill would deprive future wild deer
generations of potentially CWD-resistant genes, which could
go a long way towards providing natural protection against
CWD in the future.
So far, the only plan in Wisconsin, and Colorado, is to
kill more deer. Tom Hauge, chief of the Wisconsin DNR’s
Wildlife Division, says new “intensive harvest zones”
likely will be in place for this year’s hunt, but he adds,
“We are focused on eradicating the disease, not the deer.”
In Colorado and Wyoming, individual hunters can have their
deer and elk tested for CWD. In Colorado, the cost is $15;
in Wyoming, it’s $25. Other states don’t yet offer testing
to individuals, though they are sampling for the disease in
areas where CWD-infected animals have been found; in
Wisconsin, mandatory sampling is under way in areas with
known CWD-infected deer or elk.
Brian McCombie lives in Wisconsin and writes about wildlife and environmental issues.
