chronic wasting disease (CWD) of deer and elk, is of more concern because it might cause an incurably fatal human illness. CWD is the deer/elk equivalent of prion diseases in other animals, of which the most notorious are Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) of cattle (transmissible to humans), and scrapie of sheep. These infections cause an untreatable degeneration of the nervous system; no human infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has ever recovered.
