Cattle fed extremely high oral doses of Chronic Wasting Disease-infected brain material or kept in heavily prion-contaminated facilities for 10 years showed no neurological signs of the disease.
The University of Wyoming's Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory (WSVL), Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) collaborated in the $1.5 million study. Results will be published in the July issue of the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. Details of the study are available at bit.ly/10yearCWD.
As part of the experiment, 41 calves were randomly distributed to WGFD pens in Sybille Canyon in Wyoming, Colorado Division of Wildlife pens in Fort Collins, the WSVL and 18 to the National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa.
"It was an elegant experiment in many ways," said Hank Edwards, WGFD wildlife disease specialist. "You were taking cattle and housing them with heavily infected CWD elk and facilities. If CWD was going to jump the species barrier, it was likely you would see something in these cattle that had laid out in the pens for 10 years. That's a big deal."