DWR vigilant in efforts to halt wasting disease

If you have plans of traveling to Pennsylvania sometime in the future, best leave at home: heads of game animals, including brain, tonsils, eyes and retropharyngeal lymph nodes; spinal cord/backbone; spleen; skull plate with attached antlers, if visible brain or spinal cord material is present; cape, if visible brain or spinal cord material is present; upper canine teeth, if root structure or other soft material is present; any object or article containing visible brain or spinal cord material; and brain-tanned hides.

Sound a little morbid?

There's good reason for the body-parts ban — chronic wasting disease. A few years back, the U.S. secretary of agriculture identified CWD as a "national disease emergency."

Once given only as passing glance, states are now taking the possible spread of the disease very seriously. Case in point: Pennsylvania.

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources is doing an excellent job in trying to locate and isolate the disease. Each year, large numbers of deer and elk, taken by hunters on their respective hunts, are checked and tested.

And, although there are some here in Utah who don't take it as seriously as they should (since it has yet to jump from the wild to the domestic), CWD cannot be taken lightly.

It's spreading. It's fatal. And, once in the wild, it's permanent.

First identified in an area along the borders of Colorado and Wyoming near Cheyenne in 1967, and pretty much confined there for years, it has, in recent years, spread.

We have it here in Utah. Luckily, cases have been limited to fewer than 20 deer in three areas of the state. The simple fact that Utah has so few cases is an indication that the disease is relatively new.

At first thought to infect only elk and deer, it most recently was found to have jumped to moose.

States under the travel ban are Colorado, Illinois, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming, as well as the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Oh, yes, and Utah.

All of the above states have reported cases of CWD.

Pennsylvania does not have it and does not want it.

Not much is really known about the disease. It is a transmissible spongiform that results in a progressive and always fatal disease of the nervous system.