In an article by Bill Monroe, the wildlife editor, who quotes an ominous warning from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife written to 250 Oregon taxidermists, dated September 21, 1999.

"We are writing ... about a potential wildlife health risk and disposal of deer and elk parts from specific areas in Colorado or Wyoming. If you do not work with deer or elk harvested in thses states, the following probably does not apply directly to you."

The memo advised the wearing of dust mask, goggles and rubber gloves when working with skulls and brain tissue.

Wildlife biologists throughout the west are warily erecting what barriers they can to the spread of a wildlife disease known as chronic wasting. The incurably fatal, stubbornly resistant and little-understood brain disorder first appeared in the 1960s and '70s in state research herds and private elk ranches in Rocky Mountain and Midwest states and Saskatchewan, Canada.

Bill Monroe reports that chronic wasting has spread to a nine county area of southeast Wyoming and north central Colorado, but not beyond... (emphasis mine... again not a scientific statement... it's more proper to state that it hasn't been found outside the stated area... and then we can ask if anyone has been looking.)

... Even there, it has been found in less than 10 percent of wild deer and elk, and mostly in a single county. (The British outbreak occurred in less than 5 percent of their cattle herd!)

...Oregon and Washington officials said neither chronic wasting nor venison-related Creutzfeldt-Jakob have been reported in the Northwest. (Technically this may be correct but there certainly have been some suspicious deaths!)

... Hunters or their guides almost always skin deer and elk in the field, which includes carefully removing the scalp, called a "cape", and discarding the skull and bones. (Hunters wishing to save the "horns" saw into the brain case to retain enough skull to hold the antlers together... and the State of Oregon requires hunters to retain proof of sex.. (the horns) together with the eyes of the animal... tell me how anyone does that without retaining a portion of the skull!)

by Paul Recer, The Associated Press.

A laboratory experiment give powerful new evidence that an infectious protein that causes mad cow disease also causes a new type of fatal human brain disease that has killed 51 people in Europe...

experts suggested mad cow disease possibly could be linked to the brain-wasting human disease... Because the new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob is thought to have an incubation period of at least 10 years, experts say it is impossible to know how many people have been infected.

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