Cattle fed extremely high oral doses of chronic wasting disease (CWD)-infected brain material or kept in heavily prion-contaminated facilities for 10 years showed no neurological signs of the disease according to University of Wyoming Department of Veterinary Sciences researchers. The long timespan of the research is important, as CWD is a slow disease and these results are good news for cattlemen.
Source: University of Wyoming, May 23, 2018. Link.
“It was an elegant experiment in many ways,” says Hank Edwards, WGFD wildlife disease specialist. “You were taking cattle and housing them with heavily infected CWD elk and facilities. If CWD was going to jump the species barrier, it was likely you would see something in these cattle that had laid out in the pens for 10 years. That’s a big deal.”
INSIGHTS: Livestock veterinarians, sportsmen and producers will be glad to see this information. Use it to open a discussion of various elements of biosecurity.