http://www.mad-cow.org/00/may00_last_news.html
According to an interview conducted by the NY Times at the Miami CJD
Foundation meeting, Dr. Byron Caughey at federal Rocky Mtn labs in Hamilton,
Montana has shown chronic wasting disease in deer and elk has potential to
cause TSE disease in humans. Prions taken from the brains of infected deer
and elk are able to convert normal human prion to the protease-resistant
form, a well-studied proxy for ability to transmit disease across species.
The efficiency of the process is fairly low compared to human-human
conversion. Caughey and coworkers have previously established that sheep
scrapie has about the same efficiency as BSE in converting human.
Reportedly, M.Miller et al. of the Colorado Division of Wildlife have a
paper in press in the J of Wildlife Diseases, April or July 2000 reporting
that levels of detectable CWD infection have reached the staggering level of
15% of the deer in Larimer County, Colorado. A letter sent by DOW to
property owners proposes to slaughter affected and unaffected animals alike
by increasing permits to 60% annual kill.

While it is too late to do anything about the hundreds of thousands of
hunters and others who have eaten tainted deer and elk meat, it may be
possible to limit the geographic extent of the epidemic in wildlife.
Back-transmission to domestic sheep and cows is another serious
possibility -- here, because the prion proteins are more similar, less of a
species barrier is expected compared to humans.
AJS