"We're afraid and you can see why we're afraid," Tim Feldner of the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said at a Chronic Wasting Disease Symposium held at Hamilton High School. The symposium, which drew about 100 people, was put on by Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a federal lab that has been studying the family of brain-wasting diseases for 40 years, longer than any other lab in the country.
The ailment has shown up in wild deer and elk just 100 miles from the state border, both in Wyoming to the south and Saskatchewan to the north, he said. Montana is in the process of crafting a state plan to prevent chronic wasting from showing up here or to contain the disease if it does occur.
The plan also suggests banning feeding deer and elk. As a state, Montana does not feed deer or elk, but citizens may as long as it doesn't unnaturally congregate animals. Feldner said Montana should consider banning the practice outright.
The plan also calls for closing the state's rehabilitation center for orphaned fawns. Right now, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks takes in about 50 fawns a year at a central rehabilitation center in Helena. The animals are taught to live in the wild and returned to the place they were found.
But that involves concentrating the animals unnaturally, Feldner said. If one of those fawns had chronic wasting, it could spread to fellow orphans and then farmed out throughout the state.
"The benefit to wildlife (of rehabilitation) is zero," he said. "The risk? We don't really know."
The plan also lays out how the state may deal with chronic wasting if it is ever found here. That plan calls for killing up to half the deer or elk within 5 miles of where the first case was found if more than 1 percent of the animals in the area test positive. From there, he said, the state would continue testing other animals.
The plan is expected to be formally released later this month and people will be able to comment on it. A final plan is expected by this summer.
Chronic wasting disease is the deer and elk strain of a family of diseases known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, TSEs.
Rocky Mountain Labs scientists also gave an overview of the TSEs, about which science knows relatively little. The diseases are associated with a nearly ubiquitous protein found in the tissues of almost every mammal, said Sue Priola, a lab researcher. For reasons that are still not clear, that protein sometimes misfolds. That misfolded protein is called a prion and it cannot be destroyed by the normal ways the body digests proteins.
Left to run amok in the body, these indestructible, misshapen prions form long strands and congregate in the brain and central nervous system, Priola said. There, prions cause holes in the brain, which lead to a series of devastating symptoms always followed by death.
It's not clear exactly what causes the prion to get misshapen, she said. One theory holds the prions themselves are infectious, although what causes the first prion to become misshapen is unclear. Another theory holds that some yet unknown virus actually causes the disease and the misshapen prions are merely another symptom.
The biggest question, she said, is whether chronic wasting can spread to people who eat the meat of infected deer and elk, the same way people who eat beef infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, get the deadly human form of the disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
There's no evidence that chronic wasting disease can spread to people, she said. Plus, while both humans and deer and elk make the protein involved in TSEs, they are not identical between humans and animals. But it's still possible the disease could switch species.
"Humans could be susceptible," she said. "But transmission wouldn't be very easy."
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