Wasting Disease Spread in Deer Without Direct Contact
Date: 20-May-04
Country: USA
"We have long suspected that CWD could be transmitted when healthy deer were exposed to excreta and carcasses of mule deer that had the disease," lead author Dr. Michael W. Miller, from the Colorado Division of Wildlife in Fort Collins, said in a statement.
"Our findings show that environmental sources of infection may contribute to CWD epidemics, and illustrate how potentially complex these epidemics may be in natural populations," he added.
As reported in the upcoming June issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Miller's team evaluated CWD transmission by confining healthy deer to various paddocks.
One set of paddocks contained CWD-infected deer, another set contained the carcasses of animals that had died from CWD, and a third set of paddocks had been occupied by infected animals in the past.
Although CWD was most likely to be spread in the direct exposure group, transmission also occurred in all of the paddock groups, the researchers note.
The dynamics of CWD transmission and "their implications for disease management need to more completely understood," they add.
SOURCE: Emerging Infectious Diseases, June 2004.