GREEN RIVER - A new study on chronic wasting disease shouldn't panic Wyoming hunters and others into not eating venison, Game and Fish Department officials said.

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that hunters and others who consume venison containing the proteins that cause the deadly brain ailment chronic wasting disease will get the disease, according to Wyoming Game and Fish Department scientists.

A new report in Friday's issue of the journal Science said people who eat venison meat from CWD-infected deer could swallow small quantities of the disease-causing proteins, known as prions. The report was prepared by Colorado and Kentucky scientists who found "significant" amounts disease-causing prion proteins in the hamstring muscle of deer dying from chronic wasting disease, the Denver Post reported.

Wyoming officials said the risk of death to humans who eat such meat appear nonexistent.

"Nobody has ever died from CWD and people have been eating (deer meat that could contain prions) for 25 years," said Terry Kreeger, Supervisor of the Game and Fish Department's Veterinary Research Services.

"We find no evidence from the epidemiological perspective or any investigations that humans get this disease," he said in a phone interview. "There is some very good, very compelling research out there that says its very highly unlikely that humans can get this disease."

CWD is a transmissible disease found in some deer and a few elk that attacks the central nervous system of the animal, causing the infected animal to basically waste away. The disease is 100 percent fatal to animals that contract it and there is currently no known cure for the disease.

The disease was first detected in the Rocky Mountain region in 1967. It was found in Wyoming by the end of that decade and has been endemic in an approximately 12,000 square-mile area of southeastern Wyoming and northwestern Colorado for more than 30 years.

The movement of the disease in recent years to areas near Worland in the Big Horn Mountains and in the Sierra Madres marking the first discovery of CWD west of the Continental Divide, has prompted concerns that the disease could arrive at some of the 22 supplemental feedgrounds operated by Game and Fish in western Wyoming and at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson.

Kreeger called the new Science study "one more piece of the puzzle" in the CWD research effort.

Scientists still don't know whether the deer prions can sicken people, researcher Glenn Telling, a molecular biologist at the University of Kentucky and a co-author of the new study, told The Denver Post. The finding, he told the newspaper, "raises the stakes."

Previously, Kreeger said, researchers could only detect prions in the central nervous system of deer and elk and in organs such as spleen and lymph nodes.

"As the scientific process evolved, we realized that prions were probably being transported in the blood and if so, one's got to assume that there's some prions in the meat tissue," he said. "Now it does appear (the study shows) that prions are in the meat at some level."

Kreeger said the study's researchers basically took extracts of the CWD-infected deer meat and injected it into mice.

"With this model, this wasn't just a mouse, it was a mouse that was made basically into a very good miniature deer in regards to its susceptibility to CWD … it was primed, if you will, for exposure to CWD prions regardless of the source," said Kreeger.

"But what the mouse wasn't was a miniature human … they've done similar studies in the past with mice that were like little humans and mice that were like little elk," he said.

"They injected the CWD prions with the mouse elk and they all died and they injected CWD prions into the human mice and none of them died," Kreeger said.

"So basically the reality of this research, from a pure scientific perspective, is that if a deer eats the muscle of another CWD-infected deer, then that deer could get CWD," he said.

"But it's total speculation to move that to humans eating deer muscle. Any extrapolation to humans is totally speculative."

Kreeger noted that tens of millions of people at mad cow-infected beef in the 1990s and only 150 people actually contracted the disease.

"I think the public is smart enough to do that same kind of assessment (with CWD)," he said. "Some people are uncomfortable with the risk, so it really all comes down to an individual's risk assessment. For people who are risk tolerant and analyze all the information, this is probably no big deal."

Southwest Wyoming Bureau reporter Jeff Gearino can be reached at 307-875-5359 or at gearinotrib.com.