LANDER - Chronic wasting disease could reach Wyoming's elk feedgrounds by next year, a biologist for a conservation group says.

Lloyd Dorsey of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition speculated that with known migration patterns of deer and elk between the Owl Creek Mountains and the Gros Ventre area, it would not be impossible for the disease to crop up next year, in or around elk feedgrounds.

"There is no biogeographic barrier in the way," such as an insurmountable mountain range or desert, Dorsey said.

Chronic wasting disease attacks the central nervous systems of deer and elk and is 100 percent fatal to the animals, causing them to basically waste away and die. The disease has been endemic in a 12,000-square-mile area of southeastern Wyoming and northwestern Colorado for more than 30 years, but in recent years it has spread north and west. Its recent discovery in a whitetail deer on the Wind River Indian Reservation west of Thermopolis in the Owl Creek Mountains is the westernmost documented occurrence in Wyoming.

Dorsey pointed to the Wiggins Fork elk herd near Dubois as a likely transmission device for the disease to the Gros Ventre and the National Elk Refuge near Jackson. That elk herd interacts with animals both in the Owl Creek drainage and with the National Elk Refuge herd during the summer, he said.

"That's pure, pure speculation," said Terry Cleveland, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which manages 22 elk feeding grounds in northwest Wyoming.

Yet Dorsey's scenario cannot be easily dismissed, said Thomas Roffe, chief of wildlife health in the Mountain Prairie Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"That's always possible," Roffe said. Yet it is also possible that it might take years before the disease shows up in the Wyoming elk feedgrounds, he added.

For more details read Tuesday's Casper Star-Tribune.