Science raises hopes

in fight against CWD

Friday, May 4, 2007 4:43 PM CDT

The final shot in the war against chronic wasting disease that has threatened Wisconsin's deer herd may come from scientists and not from the barrel of a gun.

At least that's the theory.

But almost any news is good news in the fight against CWD when we consider that the state Department of Natural Resources has been struggling and largely ineffective in its attempts to contain � much less eradicate � the disease despite spending some $32 million since it was discovered in the state five years ago.

An audit last year showed the deer numbers in CWD infected zones had increased despite containment efforts and programs like "earn-a-buck" to encourage hunters to take antlerless deer before shooting a buck.

The state even went to using sharpshooters after the hunting season to thin the herd in CWD zones with high deer populations but low kills by hunters. That too, has been controversial.

So it was no surprise that state wildlife managers and others were taking note last week of a National Institutes of Health-funded study presented in Boston that showed some success in developing an oral vaccine in mice that was highly effective in warding off prion disease symptoms in mice.

Researchers are already expanding the vaccine study to see if they can replicate it with a vaccine for deer, elk and cows. Instead of using weapons to control the disease, these "shots" of vaccine would be administered through animal feed set out in CWD hot spots.

The ramifications go beyond CWD, however. If the promising studies prove out they could pave the way to protect against diseased prions that cause a variety of fatal brain disorders in animals such as Mad Cow disease which devastated herds in Britain and France and has caused forced containment of beef elsewhere in the world. It could also pose a remedy for the human variant, Creutzfield-Jakob disease, which killed 137 people in Britain in the 1990s.

That's the hope, of course. Right now the vaccine is only in the "promising" stage - and sometimes those medical breakthroughs never deliver on the hopes they raise.

As one of the researchers, Dr. Thomas Wisniewski, of NYU School of Medicine in New York, put it this week, much more work is needed before the vaccine could be considered for humans.

Still, Wisniewski said, "If, for example, a more significant outbreak of chronic wasting disease in deer and elk occurs and if it were transmissible to humans, then we would need a vaccine like this to protect people in hunting areas."

That would, indeed, be good news for Wisconsin as it fights to defend its hunting traditions and to maintain a tourism and sporting attraction that generates an estimated $1.8 billion for the state each year.

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