This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

How are the anti's going to respond to this study?

Joined Nov 2010
654 Posts | 0+
Lanesboro, Minnesota
''; Someone is going to be backstroking on this one.
''; Gary
''; __________________________________________________________
''; 
'';Study: Chronic wasting disease won't wipe out elk
' ' 
' ';Print (0,0,0) Email
' ' 
' '; hour ago  â€¢  Wyoming Game and Fish
' '; 
' ';0
' ' 
' ' 10-year study conducted by the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department suggests that the effects of chronic wasting disease on elk may not be as devastating as once believed.
' 'Research has shown that genes play a role in elk susceptibility to CWD. Some elk have genes that prolong the time between exposure to the CWD prion, the infectious agent of CWD, and the onset of the disease. These genes become dominant over many decades, greatly reducing the impact of CWD on the population. Elk with these genes live longer even when heavily exposed to CWD, and therefore have more opportunity to reproduce than elk with other genes.
' 'Some people have feared that winter feedgrounds for elk would concentrate the disease resulting in a much higher incidence of CWD.
' '“This study model essentially represents the worst-case scenario that would face feedground elk,� said Terry Kreeger, retired state wildlife veterinarian for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “We predict a genetic shift over several decades favoring genes that prolong the incubation time of CWD resulting in elk populations that are able to persist in the face of the disease.�
' 'Scott Edberg, deputy chief of the Wyoming Game and Fish Wildlife Division, said, “It helps to know that based on this research, if CWD should become established on feedgrounds, we wont see a devastating effect on populations as many have feared. This research also looked at how hunting would affect populations, and it appears, Game and Fish would still need to have hunting seasons to manage elk populations even if faced with CWD on feedgrounds.�
' 'The full study was published in an issue of Ecospohere, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publication of the Ecological Society of America and can be accessed at www.esajournals.org.
' ' 
' ' 
' '; Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/study-chronic-wasting-disease-won-t-wipe-out-elk/article_f4aef0c5-fe91-5f23-88d4-fcc989ea8684.html#ixzz37UNPnLE0
 
IMO Deer farmers are raising the most vibrant and healthy deer herds on the planet. The safest place for deer to be hunted in the future is behind high fence. How long can we risk the uncontrolled deer roaming the landscape with the risk it now poses to our ecosystem?

Deer farms in the near future may again save some cervids from extinction. It is very likely that certain deer have longer alleles that indicate resistance to CWD just as scrapie in sheep. Deer farmers will quickly use the high fence as a conservation and management tool to remove deer with undesirable genomes from the breeding herd. Very quickly their herds could be CWD resistant. The uncontrolled herd in CWD endemic zones could be exterminated and restocked with resistant genetics from deer ranches. This is a potential boom for deer ranchers if we are able to prove the existence of a resistant genome in a certain genetic line.
 
CWD is a variant of scrapie.

Over the past decade, geneticists have begun to unravel why some sheep are more vulnerable than others to scrapie. They have found that different variations, or polymorphisms, in the gene coding for PrP--a cellular protein that many scientists believe becomes infectious when it converts to an abnormal form called a prion--seem to confer varying degrees of susceptibility. This correlation raises the possibility that genetically susceptible sheep could be bred out of the population, leaving only scrapie-resistant animals (see main text). Studies of sheep experimentally infected with scrapie have shown that three codons, or positions, in the PrP gene--codons 136, 154, and 171--are critical in determining whether the animal comes down with the disease. Each codon gets translated into one of the 256 amino acids of the sheep PrP protein. Individuals most vulnerable to scrapie have the amino acids valine, arginine, and glutamine at the respective positions dictated by the three codons. Using the single-letter code for amino acids, this polymorphism is referred to as VRQ. At the other extreme, sheep with the polymorphism alanine-arginine-arginine (ARR) are the most resistant.