Chronic Wasting Disease

keith8404

keith8404

Well-Known Member
Can someone(s) provide details on the current ability of zoos in the U.S. to procure deer for their collections? I have heard it has become basically impossible to add deer to a zoo now due to concerns over Chronic Wasting Disease. Does this effect availability of all cervids? Does it have any effect on obtaining other ungulates? Thanks.
 
CWD itself only infects the cervids not bovids or other ungulates. Cows, sheep and goats kept in direct contact with infected cervids never have a case of direct tramission of CWD. Now CWD can and has mutated before into BSE (also known as mad cow) or vCJD (variant form of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease) the human form of mad cow. No one knows the exact conditions it does that in.
 
There is not a consensus however on the effects on Musk Deer (Moschidae), or at least I do not know of any.
 
tschandler71 said:
CWD itself only infects the cervids not bovids or other ungulates. Cows, sheep and goats kept in direct contact with infected cervids never have a case of direct tramission of CWD. Now CWD can and has mutated before into BSE (also known as mad cow) or vCJD (variant form of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease) the human form of mad cow. No one knows the exact conditions it does that in.
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I have seen no strong evidence (yet) that CWD can cause vCJD, and certainly it cant mutate into BSE? CWD is a TSE, so is very simillar to BSE and I imagine both arose from Scrapie, but you cant say it becomes BSE. :confused:
 
CambsVet said:
I have seen no strong evidence (yet) that CWD can cause vCJD, and certainly it cant mutate into BSE? CWD is a TSE, so is very simillar to BSE and I imagine both arose from Scrapie, but you cant say it becomes BSE. :confused:
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Translation for those of us you aren't up on our pathology studies? :-)
 
gerenuk said:
Its already provided in the second posting.
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Well, not exactly. Some additional terms were used in the later post: TSE and Scrapie.
And btw, no one's actually answered the primary question regarding availability of cervids.
 
CambsVet said:
I have seen no strong evidence (yet) that CWD can cause vCJD, and certainly it cant mutate into BSE? CWD is a TSE, so is very simillar to BSE and I imagine both arose from Scrapie, but you cant say it becomes BSE. :confused:
Click to expand...

Well the somewhat speculated connection is how Alabama got the injunction against Cervid importation as a public health issue. That was the explanation I was given.
 
In the US some states have closed boarders when it comes to deer movement. Unless a property or county has been closed because of a positive then it shouldn't be a problem obtaining deer from within the state. There are still states with open boarders. I'd be discussing this with the wildlife & aggriculture departments before doing anything with deer though just at the moment.

The American Cervid Alliance has been established to look at abatement actions for CWD, get some good info out & research going. Till now its been pretty much all the different stakeholders trying to acuse each other of being the vector, whilst the prions are being dispersed in "many" different ways.

I hope we never see a CJD case from CWD, but going of scrapie & BSE, it may only be a matter of time. The UK did a great job in keeping human deaths to about 200 from BSE in the 80's. This was in domestic stock, now we are seeing a prion disease in wildlife. What will be an effective abatement action?

I'd expect that all deer also in the genus cervus to be potential carriers. This includes european red deer, sika's, sambar's & rusa's.

Khakibob
 
I've been following "common sense" approaches to like never coming in direct contact with the CNS/never letting the CNS contact the meat I'm keeping, making sure I burn it instead of leaving it. Just general things like that. Some people leave the brain and spinal column in the woods.

And again not the greatest of Scientific publications but I read an article in Field and Stream which talked about how a person developed vCJD after being a deer processor. But that is the thing with science it changes constantly.
 
Just be aware it it will take a very hot fire several hours to destroy prions.

tschandler71 is deer urine still available as a hunting lure where you are?

Cheers Khakibob
 
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