Researcher Thinks He May Have
Begun Chronic Wasting Disease

FORT COLLINS, Colo. —(AP)— Gene Schoonveld, a state Division of Wildlife biologist, believes a nutritional study he conducted with deer, sheep and goats in the late 1960s might have been the genesis of chronic wasting disease.

Schoonveld suspects some of the sheep in his study had scrapie, a relative of chronic wasting disease. He says some of the deer in the study might have become infected with scrapie, which then mutated into chronic wasting disease and spread to other deer in Colorado and Wyoming.

For more than 25 years, scientists have searched without success for the starting point for the disease, which has spread into the wild and in domestic herds of elk on game ranches.

The state is in the process of killing more than 1500 wild deer north and east of Fort Collins and more than 1000 elk infected with it on game ranches throughout the state.

Schoonveld said he doesn't have conclusive proof, but if the sheep had scrapie, it might have jumped from the sheep and mutated in deer as chronic wasting disease.

The deer and sheep were penned together from 1968 to 1971 during his master's degree project at Colorado State University.

Schoonveld was attempting to determine why mule deer didn't digest alfalfa and natural hay supplied during extremely harsh winters. Over the course of study, about three dozen deer died of what later would be identified as classic wasting disease symptoms.

It wasn't until 1977 that CWD was positively identified in the family of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSE, which includes scrapie in sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease in domestic cattle.

``I learned after the study that some of the sheep may have had scrapie, and I think they infected deer, which in turn infected wild deer that came around the pens during rutting season, in particular,'' Schoonveld said.

``I think Gene's hypothesis is very reasonable. I, too, would lean toward scrapie, but there's nothing to prove it is how this disease first began,'' said Beth Williams, a professor at the veterinary science lab at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. As a graduate student she positively identified the disease in 1977.

Wildlife division veterinarian Mike Miller, who has done extensive study on CWD, doubts Schoonveld's theory.

``In all the literature we have searched there never has been a mention of scrapie in sheep in those pens during that period. And even if there was, there is nothing to prove CWD is the result of a transfer of scrapie from infected sheep to deer or elk,'' Miller said.