CWD Found in UTAH Buck.

[buck59]

This may have already been posted sorry if it has been.

Chronic wasting disease found in Utah buck


SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Discovery of chronic wasting disease in a Utah deer was not unexpected but also not welcome.

''I'm not surprised, but a little disappointed,'' said Jim Karpowitz, state Division of Wildlife Resources big game coordinator. ''It'll change the way we do business. If it's a limited area, we'd be happy.''

The disease was found in a sample from a mule deer buck killed by a hunter last fall on Diamond Mountain, north of Vernal in northeastern Utah.

This first confirmation of the disease in the state was reported Tuesday.

Utah officials plan to aggressively expand testing in the wake of the discovery.

The state Department of Natural Resources had increased its surveillance for the disease since a deer near Craig, Colo., tested positive for it in early 2002.

The disease has been known since at least the 1970s in Colorado and Wyoming. It has been found more recently in Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Canada.

Chronic wasting disease is in the same family as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. It is a degenerative brain disorder characterized by tiny holes that give the brain a spongy appearance.

''It's important to remember that there is currently no evidence that CWD can be naturally transmitted to humans or livestock,'' Karpowitz said,

''I killed an elk last year in eastern Utah and my son Dan killed a deer, and we intend to eat both of them,'' he said.

The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have said there is no evidence that people can contract the disease from eating deer. However, mad-cow disease did jump the species barrier in Europe, and the issue remains under study.

The World Health Organization advises people not to eat any deer or elk that's known to be infected with the disease, and it also suggests against consuming certain tissues of any deer or elk, including the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils and lymph nodes.

Utah hunters cannot have meat in their freezer tested, but in the future animal heads can be tested at Utah State Diagnostic lab in Logan.

[OR186]

When I read about an outbreak in a new state my stomach gets a lump in it.This has spread so far in the last year.I hope we can get a handle on it soon.

[spectr17]

Wasting Disease Hits Utah

2/19/03

BY SKIP KNOWLES, THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Utah is now among the states in which hunters must worry whether deer meat is a loaded weapon.

Biologists have found the incurable, contagious, deer-killing brain malady known as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in a sample from a mule deer buck taken this fall on Diamond Mountain, north of Vernal in northeast Utah, officials confirmed Tuesday.

Utah wildlife officials had tested for CWD since 1998, and ramped up testing for CWD this fall after it was discovered nearby in Colorado and Wyoming. Division of Wildlife Resources workers sawed into the skulls of 1,500 deer and elk this year and had cleared 1,400 when a suspect animal sample was sent for final testing in Iowa. It came back Tuesday.

"I'm not surprised, but a little disappointed," said Jim Karpowitz, DWR big game coordinator. "It'll change the way we do business. If it's a limited area, we'd be happy."

The disease does not wipe out deer and elk herds. In the most heavily infected areas in Colorado it shows in fewer than 5 percent of deer and 1 percent of elk. However, deer tag sales could drop, hurting wildlife budgets.

Although it has never been proved to infect humans, fear of the poorly understood disease, and words such as "containment" and "eradication" come up quickly when CWD is mentioned in wildlife circles.

Meanwhile, Utah officials will aggressively expand testing. Hunters should not be alarmed, Karpowitz said, but should get informed.

"I killed an elk last year in eastern Utah and my son Dan killed a deer, and we intend to eat both of them," Karpowitz said.

Discovered in Colorado in the 1960s, CWD creates holes in the brain of deer and elk. Starvation, drooling, erratic behavior and hair loss are culminations of this prion -- or rogue protein -- disease.

It most recently was found moving west in Wyoming and in Mesa County, Colo., near Grand Junction, 70 miles from the border. Twice, penned elk herds in Utah have been wiped out for testing and to prevent possible CWD spread.

When deer tested positive last year in Wisconsin, panicked wildlife officials wiped out deer in entire counties -- as many as 40,000 in some areas. Hunters here say they do not want state officials to get trigger happy.

"Wisconsin's scorched earth policy is wrong," said Don Peay, leader of the hunting group Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which has worked to build up Utah mule deer herds.

Peay suspects the disease may have been here a long time and is only now being found because testing has increased.

"We're not alarmed, we're concerned," Peay said. "Initially it was a huge scare, but other states are dealing with it. It's been in Colorado for 20 or 30 years, and they've still had hunts over there."

CWD falls in the family of deadly transmission spongioform encephalopathies (TSE) pathogens. It was mad cow disease -- a "new variant" of Creutzfeldt-Jacob -- that broke the species barrier, leaping from sheep to cattle to humans in the mid-1990s to kill more than 100 people in Europe.

Because no evidence exists to show that CWD can travel from deer and elk to humans or any other species, many wildlife biologists speak of the species barrier as inviolable, but skeptics say absence of proof that it has infected other species is not proof that it cannot.

"Consumption of infected tissue could be fatal, as animal laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. have shown in lab tests," said Mel Steiger, a retired rocket engineer from Taylorsville who lost his wife in 1998 to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. He has studied the disease for four years.

Field tests may save hunters from fear of CWD in the future, said Karpowitz.

Hunters cannot have meat in their freezer tested, but in the future animal heads can be tested at Utah State Diagnostic lab in Logan. The number there is 435-797-1895.

Karpowitz urges hunters to check out Web sites such as http://www.CWD-info.org to start learning more about CWD.