Officials kill 1,700 mad elk (Canada)

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Officials kill 1,700 mad elk

 

Domesticated animals slaughtered in effort to stop spread of chronic wasting

disease

 

Monday, December 18, 2000

 

A federal agency has had slaughtered 1,700 domesticated elk in a bid to stop the

spread of the elk version of mad-cow disease at six Saskatchewan farms.

 

Every animal on the infected farms, plus those sold from them as long as three

years ago, is to be killed. The elk are bred for human consumption of their meat

and immature antlers.

 

The slaughter is by far the largest of its kind. The government will not name

the farms.

 

The disease, officially known as chronic wasting disease, has the potential to

damage Canada's $1-billion domestic elk and deer industry if left unchecked. At

its theoretical worst, it could sow the seeds of a public-health crisis that

could last for decades.

 

There is so far no evidence that the fatal, brain-wasting illness is

transmissible to people. Nor is there any sign that the elk version can jump to

cattle and then to humans, although researchers are still investigating.

Officials cannot say whether cattle and the infected elk were raised in adjacent

fields.

 

The order comes in the wake of a directive from the World Health Organization

stating that products from any animal carrying anything resembling mad-cow

disease must not be consumed. The aim is to make sure that the ailment does not

enter human food through elk meat products or health-food supplements containing

the product known as velvet antler.

 

" It's a reasonably harsh policy, " said Brian Peart, the senior veterinarian at

the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, who sets policy on the outbreak. " That's

partly to make up for what we lack in science. "

 

Experiments are being conducted in the United States in a bid to understand some

of the basic ways the disease works. The United States is the only other country

where chronic wasting disease is known to exist.

 

....Chronic wasting disease, or mad-elk disease, is one of a family of fatal,

untreatable illnesses known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or

TSEs.

 

It is a sister to mad-cow disease -- bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE --

which has broken out in Europe and which led to the slaughter of 4.3 million

cattle there after it was shown to have been transmitted to humans.

 

In humans, the ailment, which invariably kills as it eats away at the brain, is

called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The European type, thought to infect humans

who eat nerve or spinal tissue in beef products from an infected animal, is

called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It has killed 89, most of them in

the U.K.

 

....The government was shocked at the outbreak. Although the Canadian Food

Inspection Agency, along with health and industry officials and the provinces,

had developed a plan in early February to combat mad-elk disease, an outbreak

was just a vague fear at that point.

 

The agency didn't have a policy to handle an outbreak as serious and widespread

as the present one.

 

Canada has had only two previous cases of mad-elk disease among domesticated

elk: in 1996 and in 1998.

 

In October, after much deliberation and a trip to Colorado to visit the world's

leading experts on chronic wasting disease, the Canadian government opted to

treat mad-elk disease as if it were mad-cow disease.

 

....Most have already been killed, their bodies burned and then dumped into a

ditch lined with clay soil. The 40 remaining were alive " just because they

didn't get to them. They're on a different farm, " Dr. Peart said.

 

Some of the soil the killed elk lived on has been buried too. Any wood or metal

they came in contact with has been washed down with bleach or lye. These are

standard practices in Europe to battle mad-cow disease.

 

 

 

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