Nerve Illness Spreads to 10th State

ST. PAUL, Minn. —  Animal-health officials on Friday confirmed Minnesota’s first case of chronic wasting disease, marking the spread of the incurable illness into a 10th state.

The state Board of Animal Health said a farm-raised elk tested positive after dying mysteriously. The rest of the Aitkin County herd has been quarantined.

Officials said they didn’t know the source of the infection. They didn’t say how many animals were in the herd.

Chronic wasting disease destroys the brain in deer, elk, moose and caribou and causes the animal to grow thin and die. Once found only in a small area of Colorado and Wyoming, the illness has spread through elk ranches and wild deer and elk herds as far away as Wisconsin.

In efforts to contain the disease, thousands of captive elk have been slaughtered in Colorado and hundreds of deer have been killed in Wisconsin. The disease has also been found in New Mexico, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Canada.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum told federal officials that a third of hunters may skip this season over fears about the safety of deer meat, jeopardizing his state’s battle to control the disease.

McCallum sent a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman, urging her agency to “get off the dime” and approve a rapid test for the disease and certify private labs so they can also do testing.

Although experts say there is no evidence that chronic wasting disease can infect humans, the World Health Organization warns against eating any part of a deer with signs of the disease.

Health officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin, meanwhile, are investigating the deaths of three men, two from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and the other from Pick’s disease, another neurological illness. Some fear that chronic wasting disease could eventually show up in humans as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The men knew each other and ate at wild-game feasts hosted by one of them.