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The Wildlife Art Journal Interview with biologist Bruce Smith about the fate of America's most famous elk herd

Britons of a certain age first learned the acronym because of fear:  BSE.  In the parlance of epidemiology and safe food, it is, of course, shorthand for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.  BSE is a disease that causes degeneration in the brains of domestic cattle, turning tissue into something that resembles Swiss cheese, leaving the afflicted with the equivalent of advanced onset Alzheimer’s and resulting in complete dysfunction of the nervous system.

BSE is also known by another name, Mad Cow, and on the rare occasions that it has jumped the species to species barrier, it has manifested itself in humans as new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. More than two decades ago, thousands of meat-eating consumers in the United Kingdom were exposed to BSE when they purchased infected beef that had contracted the disease by being fed the ground up offal of other infected animals.  The offal was used as an ingredient to make cheap feed.

(Bruce Smith, right)

Looking back, disease experts believe that upwards of half a million BSE-infected animals may have been consumed by humans, exposing them, potentially, to the hardy, long-lived prion pathogens that become embedded and lay dormant incubating in their hosts.  What's of great concern is that it may take years before infected people get sick. To date, a few hundred people have died from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That's not many, certainly few in...