Scientists tracking chronic wasting disease have gone high tech.
Trent Bollinger, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, has received $250,000 for each of the next three years from PrioNet Canada to study wild deer and the transmission of the fatal neurological disease that is spreading across North America.
The study will tell his team how far the deer travel and the potential for spreading the disease found in several pockets in Saskatchewan.
The university will monitor more than 150 deer wearing electronic collars linked to satellites.
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“Animals don’t move helter-skelter across the landscape. They make use of suitable habitat types. Some percentages will move long distances and we are trying to figure out how many will make these long distance movements and how likely they are to result in spread of CWD,” he said.
Along a few sections of the South Saskatchewan River disease prevalence in deer herds is up to 10 percent.
In other areas the incidence is much lower. Scientists are trying to understand why that happens. They want to know if an individual introduced the slow spreading disease to other animals or whether environmental contamination occurs.
“The changes over time occur over decades rather than years or months so detecting long-term trends is difficult. It requires continuous monitoring and research,” Bollinger said.
In addition, researchers are looking at areas where deer congregate such as haystacks, grain bins or hay fields to see if that affects the spread of the disease.
In the past few years, 17 cases of CWD have been found near the eastern Alberta border. None have been reported in British Columbia.
In Colorado and Wyoming the disease has been established longer and there are areas where it has infected 25 to 30 percent of the population. The disease was also found in West Virginia and New Mexico.
Saskatchewan may be at an earlier stage of the disease since it was first found in wild deer in 2002.
While CWD is part of the family of prion diseases, its spread throughout the body and diagnosis are different from BSE.
“Much of our understanding of infectious diseases doesn’t necessarily apply here,”said Bollinger.
CWD and scrapie have prions more widely distributed through the body so the disease can be spread more easily from animal to animal or within the environment.
In cattle, the prions are centralized in the nervous system and BSE is believed to be spread by eating feed containing infected cattle parts.
CWD appears in muscle and blood but it is not known if that affects people who eat venison.
It is also possible to do a live test. Wild deer are captured, anesthetized and a biopsy of the tonsils is taken. Abnormal prions collect in the tonsils before clinical signs appear. A rectal biopsy is also in development because there is lymphoid tissue containing prions in that spot.
Evidence of maternal transmission has been examined but most scientists expect that animal to animal contact is more important in transmission.
