Innovation Anthology #292:
It’s a decade since the first cases of Chronic Wasting Disease appeared in farmed deer and elk on the prairies.
Since then this prion disease has jumped the fence and infected the wild populations in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Through his genetic research, Dr. David Coltman from the University of Alberta has tried to predict the spread of the disease. He’s analyzed over 5000 genetic samples from mule deer and whitetail deer.
Dr. Coltman has found there is a lot of moving and mixing between deer populations, making them genetically homogeneous.
DR. DAVID COLTMAN: The road map has super highways pointing in all directions, basically. So it’s very difficult to predict where the disease will go. Because it’s more or less likely to go in any direction. What this means from a surveillance point of view is that we need to keep looking, and we need to look widely as well. We can’t just look around places where we’ve seen it before. We need to be monitoring across the province to find out where the disease might be spreading.
Dr. Coltman is now looking at genetic factors beyond the prion gene that could influence resistance or susceptibility to Chronic Wasting Disease in deer.
Thanks today to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
< FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Program Date: 2010-02-23