Chronic wasting disease may be snuffed out of the game farm industry within five years, says a North American Elk Breeders Association official.
It may in fact already be gone, except for a couple of known infected herds.
“It doesn’t look like we’re finding many new cases,” said Steve Wolcott, a Colorado elk farmer who heads the association’s CWD monitoring program.
“It hasn’t become a widespread epidemic,” he said.
“Most people are actually surprised that more weren’t found.”
CWD has been found in 13 herds in the United States and six herds in Canada.
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The Canadian herds trace back to infected farms in South Dakota. The origin of the South Dakota infection is not definitively known, but Wolcott said it probably came from animals from the Denver zoo, which owned infected animals from the only known wilderness area with the disease.
The source of the infection in a Montana herd isn’t known, Wolcott said, but the Montana herd is the source of the infection in an Oklahoma herd.
One Colorado game farm has been infected, as has one in Nebraska. It is not known where their infections originated.
Since CWD symptoms are believed to take 18 to 30 months after contact to become visible, producers won’t know for some time whether CWD is on more farms than presently thought, Wolcott said.
“We don’t know how many we’ll find and where,” he said.
However, with industry, state and pro-vincial regulators monitoring the game farm industry, Wolcott said new outbreaks should be quickly caught and eradicated.
CWD is not the most virulent disease that affects elk and deer. Ted Leighton of the Canadian Co-operative Wildlife Health Centre said other non-eradicated wildlife diseases, such as tuberculosis, are much more dangerous to elk and deer if they get into game farm populations.
But because CWD is part of the same disease family that contains mad cow disease, industry and regulators are striving to eradicate it, rather than just minimize its threat.
Consumer concern
Wolcott said the clean-up efforts are driven more by public fear than true scientific risk from CWD-tainted elk.
“The elk industry has learned that disease control has as much to do with public perception as it does to science,” he said.
Scientists don’t know whether CWD can spread to humans, but they say the possibility is extremely unlikely.
A U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientific panel announced in January that there is no evidence that CWD has ever jumped to humans.
However, it did not say there is no risk to humans, though the chance of transmission is small.
Wolcott hopes the low number of cases so far and the expected decrease in new reports will lower public anxiety and pave the way for consumer confidence to return.
“The prognosis for getting rid of the disease is pretty good.”
