This article appeared in the latest British Deer Society Newsletter.

CHRONIC WASTING DISEASE—A REMINDER
Chronic wasting disease, or „CWD‟ as it is commonly called, is the most infectious disease of its kind having
devastating effects on many populations of wild and farmed deer including red deer. Once a deer develops clinical signs of CWD it always results in the death of the animal and there are no treatments or vaccines available to
control the disease. At present, CWD is only found in North America and it is not known where the disease originally came from. However, despite extensive and expensive efforts to control the spread of CWD over the last 10 years it is now beyond control and has been diagnosed in many states of the US and two of Canada‟s provinces.
CWD belongs to the same family of diseases as scrapie, which affects sheep and goats, and „mad cow disease‟ which is known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or „BSE‟ for short. This family of diseases are known collectively as „transmissible spongiform encephalopathies‟ or „TSE‟ for short. Chronic wasting disease is the most infectious disease of the TSE family and is the only one its kind which circulates in wild animals. It only affects deer and there is no evidence that it can naturally infect or cause disease in any non-deer species such as occurs with BSE.
Despite extensive surveillance in Europe there have never been any reports of cases of naturally occurring BSE, or any TSE in any species of deer, and therefore deer are considered resistant to naturally acquired BSE. Unfortunately the clinical signs of CWD are the same as those found in scientific studies in which red deer were experimentally infected by injecting them with BSE. This means that although we believe deer are resistant to naturally acquired BSE, if CWD became established in Europe we would be unable to tell the two diseases apart except by expensive laboratory tests. Testing would be necessary to protect the public from any chance, no matter how small or
theoretical, of BSE infected venison entering the human food chain.
As BSE can infect people it is therefore vital that we keep CWD out of Europe. The introduction of CWD would result in devastating effects on our various deer populations and catastrophic consequences on the industries that rely on them. If CWD infected any deer in Europe, especially those in a wild population, the chances of being able to
eradicate the disease would very small.
Government legislation in the UK forbids the feeding of animal derived protein to ruminants and this includes all mammalian meat and bone meal, meat meal, bone meal, hoof meal, horn meal, greaves, poultry meal, poultry offal meal, feather meal plus gelatine from ruminants. Further information on this legislation can be found at:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfa...ication/feed-ban.htm
How Can You Help Prevent Entry of this Devastating Disease to Europe?
CWD is highly infectious and the infectious agent is very resistant to both weather conditions and normal
disinfectants so it can remain in the environment for a long time. Additionally, it has been shown to stick to soil par-ticles very efficiently. The only way to inactivate the infectious agent of CWD is to soak articles in a solution of bleach that has 20,000 parts per million of active chlorine for one hour or, alternatively, 2 molar sodium hydroxide. This treatment would obviously be highly detrimental to most clothing, footwear and hunting equipment. Therefore it is essential that hunters visiting Europe from North America and Europeans returning home from hunting trips to North America do not bring contaminated or potentially contaminated articles of clothing, footwear or other hunting equipment into Europe. This is also important for non-hunters visiting affected areas in North America as their footwear, clothing and camping or fishing equipment etc. could also become contaminated and introduce the disease to Europe.
Meticulous cleaning of all adherent debris will significantly reduce the risk of introducing CWD to this country, as will restricting hunters to bringing their own rifle only rather than all their hunting equipment. However, clothing and footwear for use in Europe should be bought in Europe and any that has been used in North America should remain there and trophies would have to be soaked in bleach as stated above to ensure decontamination.
For more information on CWD, including the latest situation on North America you can visit:
www.cwd-info.org,
or for a summary go directly to
http://www.cwd-info.org/index....ction/about.overview

'Animal derived protein' Last year there were two cases of CWD in our state of PA.Both were raised deer from the same ranch ! That has always seemed to be the common link in these cases .Irresponsible feeding ,look for that !

the sky is falling, the sky is falling.....

buy your hunting clothes/boots IN Europe??

CWD is only found in isolated spots in North America and most of those are inside a game fence. Most of the wild CWD infected animals are in Co/Ne/Wy. If you haven't trecked in those areas there is no worry. And so far there has been no evidence of CWD transmission because of infected boots/clothes.

Irresponsible feeding has nothing to do with CWD, it isn't spread thru feed here in the US. CWD started in Colorado, it is NOT a naturally occuring disease. It has been spread across the US by way of motor vehicle from deer facility to deer facility, then thru the fence by nose to nose contact or escapes.

damn, I believe there is more mis-information about CWD than most anything else...

Miller MW, Williams ES
Colorado Division of Wildlife, Wildlife Research Center, 317 West Prospect Road, Fort Collins, CO 80526-2097, USA. mike.miller@state.co.us
Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology [2004, 284:193-214]

"Chronic wasting disease (CWD) has recently emerged in North America as an important prion disease of captive and free-ranging cervids (species in the deer family). CWD is the only recognized transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) affecting free-ranging species. Three cervid species, mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), white-tailed deer (O. virginianus), and Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni), are the only known natural hosts of CWD. Endemic CWD is well established in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado, and has been present in this 'core area' for two decades or more. Apparently CWD has also infected farmed cervids in numerous jurisdictions, and has probably been endemic in North America's farmed deer and elk for well over a decade. Several free-ranging foci distant to the Colorado-Wyoming core area have been discovered since 2000, and new or intensified surveillance may well identify even more foci of infection. Whether all of the identified captive and free-ranging foci are connected via a common original exposure source remains undetermined. Some of this recently observed 'spread' may be attributable to improved detection or natural movements of infected deer and elk, but more distant range extensions are more likely caused by movements of infected captive deer and elk in commerce, or by some yet unidentified exposure risk factor. Research on CWD over the last 5 years has resulted in a more complete understanding of its pathogenesis and epidemiology. CWD is infectious, transmitting horizontally from infected to susceptible cervids. Early accumulation of PrP(CWD) in alimentary tract-associated lymphoid tissues during incubation suggests agent shedding in feces or saliva as plausible transmission routes. Residual infectivity in contaminated environments also appears to be important in sustaining epidemics. Improved tests allow CWD to be reliably diagnosed long before clinical signs appear. Implications of CWD are not entirely clear at this time. Natural transmission to humans or traditional domestic livestock seems relatively unlikely, but the possibility still evokes public concerns; impacts on wildlife resources have not been determined. Consequently, where CWD is not known to occur surveillance programs and regulations that prevent or reduce the likelihood that CWD will be introduced into these jurisdictions should be encouraged. Where CWD is known to occur, affected jurisdictions are conducting surveillance to estimate and monitor trends in geographic distribution and prevalence, managing deer and elk populations in attempts to limit spread, and developing and evaluating techniques for further controlling and perhaps eradicating CWD. Programs for addressing the challenges of CWD management will require interagency cooperation, commitment of funds and personnel, and applied research. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is perhaps the most enigmatic of the naturally occurring prion diseases. Although recognized as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) since the late 1970s (Williams and Young 1980, 1982), interest in and concern about CWD has only recently emerged. CWD most closely resembles scrapie in sheep in most respects, but recent media and public reaction to CWD has been more reminiscent of that afforded to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) less than a decade ago. Yet, with the exception of transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), CWD is the rarest of the known animal TSEs: fewer than 1,000 cases have been diagnosed worldwide, and all but two of these occurred in North America. CWD is unique among the TSEs in that it affects free-living species (Spraker et al. 1997; Miller et al. 2000). The three natural host species for CWD, mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), white-tailed deer (O. virginianus), and Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni), are all in the family Cervidae and native to North America. Like scrapie, CWD is contagious: epidemics are self-sustaining in both captive and free-ranging cervid populations (Miller et al. 1998, 2000). The geographic extent of endemic CWD in free-ranging wildlife was initially thought to be quite limited and its natural rate of expansion slow; however, recent investigations have revealed that CWD has been inadvertently spread much more widely via market-driven movements of infected, farmed elk and deer. Both the ecological and economic consequences of CWD and its spread remain to be determined; moreover, public health implications remain a question of intense interest"

Yes, it may an overcautious response from us Europeans but, given that the mode of transmission is not completely understood and that, despite efforts to corral it in the USA it continues to spread, our caution is surely understandable. If you add to this our experiences with BSE:
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its epidemiology
Peter G Smith and Ray Bradley
"Since the recognition of BSE in 1986, over 180,000 cattle in the UK have developed the disease and 1–3 million are likely to have been infected with the BSE agent, most of which were slaughtered for human consumption before developing signs of the disease. The origin of the first case of BSE is unknown, but the epidemic was caused by the recycling of processed waste parts of cattle, some of which were infected with the BSE agent, to other cattle in feed. Control measures have resulted in the consistent decline of the epidemic in the UK since 1992. Cattle and feed exported from the UK have seeded smaller epidemics in other European countries, where control measures were applied later. If the control measures now in place to protect public and animal health are well enforced, the epidemic in cattle should be largely under control and any remaining risk to humans through the consumption of beef should be very small."

Predicted vCJD mortality in Great Britain
Azra C. Ghani1, Neil M. Ferguson1, Christl A. Donnelly1 & Roy M. Anderson1

"There is continued speculation about the likely number of cases of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) that will occur in Great Britain in the wake of the BSE epidemic in cattle and in light of a recent cluster of vCJD cases in Leicestershire, England. We show here that the current mortality data are consistent with between 63 and 136,000 cases among the population known to have a susceptible genotype (about 40% of the total population), with on average less than two cases of vCJD arising from the consumption of one infected bovine."

OK, the forgoing is just a sample of the Science behind this and not all are in agreement. However there are well over 100,000 people in the UK who may potentially develop vCJD because the disease and the causes of it weren't spotted or acted upon early enough. Perhaps, have read this background, you can understand our caution a little better. 80)

BTW, as an aside, the big current story in the UK isn't the continued use of mechanically recovered meat in cheap burgers, its that they were using horse instead of beef! Go figure!

Here is a link showing a map from 2012 of where confirmed CWD cases have been found.

http://www.cwd-info.org/index....fuseaction/about.map

The group that produced this map is a good source of information concerning CWD.

As with any other issue, misinformation from all sides of the issue is floating around.

As can be seen from the map, CWD is not confined to 2 or 3 states nor to captive deer.

Also, the manner in which the disease is spread is more complicated than just walking thru vegetation in areas where the disease has been confirmed.

Dave, CWD continues to spread across the US because folks still put infected deer in trailers and move em by road. This is the major "mode of transmission/transportation" .

The "endemic" area of Co, Wy, and Ne is by natural movement based on released sick deer from the State of Colorados Foothills Wildlife Research Station in Ft Collins Co WHERE CWD ORIGINATED IN THE FACILITIES RESEARCH PENS. Infected does were released in the area around Ft Collins and also shipped to several zoos, other research stations, and to private enclosures.

In the early years one could back trace all known CWD infected deer directly to Ft Collins.

quote:

Originally posted by DTala:
Dave, CWD continues to spread across the US because folks still put infected deer in trailers and move em by road. This is the major "mode of transmission/transportation" .

The "endemic" area of Co, Wy, and Ne is by natural movement based on released sick deer from the State of Colorados Foothills Wildlife Research Station in Ft Collins Co WHERE CWD ORIGINATED IN THE FACILITIES RESEARCH PENS. Infected does were released in the area around Ft Collins and also shipped to several zoos, other research stations, and to private enclosures.

In the early years one could back trace all known CWD infected deer directly to Ft Collins.

The proportion of the CWD infected landscape that is from wild-to-wild animal transmission and associated migration is increasing at an alarming rate. While transportation of captive cervids is the usual source for new foci, it is the spread of CWD by wildlife that is creating vast tracks of infected landscape.

With the recent understanding of this prion's ability to remain dormant in soils and directly infect ungulates means that we can likely never get rid of it now.


USDA, Prionet(Canada), WHO, and other human health organizations are discussing action plans for the potential scenario that CWD mutates in fashion that allows for human infection. This is what the Warning in the OP is about.
Consider the ramifications if CWD in N america were to becomes a disease transmitable to humans. It will be an outright war on wildlife. Precautionary measures being discussed by USA and Canadian governments in such a scenario include the complete extirpation of wild ungulates.

We(the human population) may get lucky with CWD and it will not mutate to a human infectious form, we may even learn some important lessons. Game farming is asking for trouble....

Yup, game farming, feeding of ungulates resulting in their coming together in unnaturally large groups, transporting dead animals to our homes then dumping the bones in the ditch after butchering, that stuff is all bad juju.

quote:

Meticulous cleaning of all adherent debris will significantly reduce the risk of introducing CWD to this country

Funny that I receive more remarks concerning the condition of my equipment upon my arrival in Great Livermere annually for our AR Weekend. Mostly quaint remarks about the clean, polishd boots, spotless clothing and alot of attention to detail on the remaining ancilliarly equipment, rucksack, gunslip, etc.

No, it's not that I'm anal concerning my equipment, just I've hunted the World and been stopped and queried, including having my equipment inspected by as many Agricultural Inspectors as Customs Agents for Firearms.

I've been stopped and inspected entering the United States, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Net, a small amount attention to detail helps avoid all sorts of unpleasant delays.

CWD is a huge concern here in Southern Alberta.
It spread from elk farms in Saskatchewn. It is most prevalent in Mule deer. I spoke to a biologist who said it was most easily transmitted in clay soil areas where deer bed down in arid clay areas(that's pretty much everywhere here).
I hunted in a zone a couple of years ago where it is mandatory to submit the head of any deer harvested for testing. No cases locally so far, and hoping it stays that way.