Correspondent Michael Bodenchuk is part of the USDA team that recently identified Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in wild deer in the hunting state of Texas for the first time. We asked him to bring us up to speed on what we need to know about CWD: Many subscribers are eagerly anticipating their upcoming fall deer, elk and moose hunts. Anyone who hunts these species away from home needs to be aware of CWD and its possible repercussions. CWD has now been identified in wild herds in Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In Canada, it's been found in Saskatchewan and Alberta. In some other states, the disease has been found only in captive herds, which have been eliminated. CWD is a chronic, fatal disease of the central nervous system of white-tailed deer, mule deer and Rocky Mountain elk. It was first recognized in captive mule deer in Colorado in the late 1960s and identified in the wild in 1981. It has also been identified in moose, but this occurrence is very rare. CWD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), or "prion" disease. Other TSE's include bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("Mad Cow Disease"), scrapie in domestic sheep, feline spongiform encephalopathy (in Europe) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans. While CWD is similar to "Mad Cow Disease", there is no evidence that CWD can be transmitted to humans. CWD is caused by a prion, an abnormal protein. Prions are neither bacteria nor viruses and are not alive. Rather, they are strings of amino acids that differ in sequence from normal cellular proteins. Prion proteins cause a change in normal cellular proteins. This eventually causes brain cells to die, ultimately leading to death. CWD appears to spread among animals in two ways. At low infection rates or low animal densities, CWD is likely spread by direct contact between animals through saliva, urine or feces, and by nose-to-nose contact and grooming. However, the disease can also be spread through the environment (infected soil or water). Since prions are not........(
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