The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission continued its Chronic Wasting Disease Tour before a standing-room-only crowd Tuesday at the Janet Huckabee Nature Center in Fort Smith.
The next and last scheduled stop on this tour will be at 6 p.m. today at Cross Church in Springdale.
Cory Gray, the Game and Fish Commission's chief of research, led the six-piece a cappella outfit in a tight, well-structured performance that featured Dr. Jennifer Ballard, the AGFC's veterinarian, on lead vocals. Ralph Meeker, Wes Wright and Mark Hutchings supplied backup vocals. Meeker is the commission's deer program coordinator. Wright is the elk program coordinator and Hutchings is the assistant chief of the wildlife division.
The Fort Smith meeting was considerably different than the 2016 meetings that were held shortly after chronic wasting disease was discovered in deer and elk in Newton County. Those meetings had an atmosphere of shock and dread.
Since then, the Game and Fish Commission has released a free and comprehensive flow of information to the public about chronic wasting disease. The Fort Smith crowd was up to speed on the basics, which enabled the AGFC's staff to discuss proposed regulations designed to slow the spread of the disease to other parts of the state.
Proposed regulations include creating a tier-based carcass movement restriction in the CWD management zone. A Tier 1 "red" zone would include Newton, Carroll, Madison and Boone counties. A Tier 2 "orange" zone would include Benton, Crawford, Franklin, Johnson, Logan, Pope, Searcy, Marion, Sebastian, Yell, Washington and Van Buren counties.
The regulation would prohibit moving whole deer carcasses in the red zone to any county outside of the red zone. Whole deer carcasses taken in the orange zone could not be transported to counties where CWD has not been identified.
Audience members queried the panel on a wide range of topics, including protocols for testing deer for chronic wasting disease. One man, age 76, said that he hunts deer to eat, and that two weeks is too long to wait for a test result.
Ballard said the turnaround time for test results will get faster, especially if the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission gets a diagnostic laboratory. Currently, the AGFC sends CWD samples to a lab in Wisconsin.
Another person asked if aggressive use of prescribed burning will destroy infectious proteins, or prions, from the environment and reduce the chance of passive infection.
"Fire has to be very, very hot before it will destroy a prion, and it's a combination of pressure and fire," Ballard said. "The average fire probably is not going to burn a lot of prions."
Special incinerators are used to destroy CWD-infected tissue, but it might not be enough. Daniel Gadjusek won the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1976 for his work studying a human prion disease called kuru. That was more than a decade before Dr. Stanley Prusiner coined the term "prion" while studying variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Gadjusek, who died in 2008, said that even the ash of incinerated prions is infectious.
Another audience member challenged the panel about the efficacy of regulations restricting the use of attractants and feeding wildlife. The AGFC prohibits the use of deer urine to attract deer but allows synthetic scent. A CWD-infected buck will pollute a mock scrape made with a synthetic product, he said, which makes synthetic products potentially complicit in spreading the disease.
The same applies to food plots versus corn piles, he added. An infected deer will eat a leaf from a turnip plant, and then turn and eat a leaf from another plant as it meanders across a plot. In this way it will infect a greater area and potentially expose more deer to shed prions from urine, feces and saliva.
"Why are we still baiting?" he asked. "Does harvest outweigh the possibility of spreading this [disease] further?"
Another audience member asked the question that matters most. "This [chronic wasting disease] is never going to stop, so what's your objective?"
"We have to be adaptive," Ballard said. "The research is progressing, but we're going to learn a lot more."
When "Prion" Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in 1997, he predicted a cure before the end of that decade. He now acknowledges that a cure is no closer than it was then.
A cure is unlikely to originate with the AGFC, so the only realistic objective is to keep the disease from spreading.
Sports on 04/05/2018