Wasting Diseases

Earthfile, September 18, 1998
Mystery illness first appeared 30 years ago

Health authorities in the American west are teaming up with federal and British scientists to study a new form of chronic wasting disease that is afflicting wild deer and elk - and stumping wildlife experts. Despite first being observed almost 30 years ago, little is known about the disease, which riddles brain tissue with microscopic holes, ultimately killing its victims.

The wasting disease is a form of spongiform encephalopathy, the same type of disorder as mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and scrapie, a disease that infects sheep. The course of the disease, first observed in the late 1960s in a small group of captive mule deer near Fort Collins in northern Colorado, is often unrelenting, experts say. Before they die, the animals become dazed, stumbling near-skeletons, drooling excessively and apparently experiencing dementia.

While humans eating beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease can develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it hasn’t been established that eating deer or elk afflicted with chronic wasting disease would similarly infect people. Still, health and wildlife authorities in Colorado and Wyoming are concerned that hunters could become infected after eating meat from sick animals. ... Colorado hunters are advised to wear rubber gloves when field-dressing deer and elk carcasses, to minimize the handling of brain and spinal tissues and to wash their hands thoroughly afterwards. They are also cautioned against eating the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen and lymph nodes of their kill.