A recent Food Safety News piece examining chronic wasting disease (CWD) brought up the question about how to manage the disease. As noted, CWD has never infected humans. The difficulty with CWD, however, is the fear that it could harm free-ranging deer and elk populations combined with the fact that there is no live-animal test…
‘Surprising’ Discovery Made About Chronic Wasting Disease
An infectious brain disease that has been killing deer, elk and moose both in the wild and on “captive farms” continues to stalk the land, expanding its domain to 23 states and two Canadian provinces since it was first identified in captive mule deer in a Colorado research facility in 1967.
Known as chronic wasting …
Search Underway for Any More ‘Mad Cows’
The dead Hanford, CA dairy cow with laboratory-confirmed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is now the centerpiece of an investigation into whether there are any more mad cows in the vicinity.
Dairymen in the Central Valley of California have been told state and federal officials are testing the BSE-infected animal’s feeding herd, which could include some …
New Test for Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease
A news release from the National Institutes of Health Tuesday reports that scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have developed a new way to detect variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD) in blood plasma that they say is 10,000 times more sensitive than other methods.
In humans, vCJD is zoonotic foodborne disorder, …
Study Answers How CWD Spreads in Herds
Researchers discovered chronic wasting disease in Colorado and 42 years later the Centennial State remains at the center of studies into the fatal neurological disease found in deer, elk and moose.
For example, a team of scientists from the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Wildlife Research Center and the University of California at San Francisco reported …
Attention Hunters: Check CWD Regulations
Early snow in the West’s high country sent deer, elk and moose down to lower elevations where hunters are waiting this hunting season. Hunters see themselves as rugged individualists out to shoot a trophy animal, but for wildlife agencies they are foot soldiers going out this time of year as a surveillance army in the…