http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AnSci/BSE/TSE_Transmission_Concerns.htm
 
www.avma.org/communications/brochures/ cwd/cwd_brochure.pdf
 
www.avma.org/communications/brochures/cwd/cwd_faq.asp - 25k
 
including:
>Q:
>  Can CWD be transmitted to other animal species?
>A:
>There is currently no evidence that CWD is transmittable to other
>ruminants such as sheep, cattle, or goats under natural conditions.
>Neither livestock housed with infected deer or elk, nor those that have
>ingested the brain tissue of infected animals have developed the
>disease.  Chronic wasting disease has been experimentally transmitted to
>mice, ferrets, mink, goats, squirrel monkeys, and calves by artificial
>means such as injection directly into the brain.
 
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no1/brown.htm
 
including:
>What muted concerns about human infection was the presumption
>that BSE originated from scrapie, and scrapie was not a human pathogen.
>Nevertheless, even those who considered human risk to be remote
>acknowledged that scrapie might unpredictably show an altered host
>range after passage through cattle. Experimental precedents for such
>behavior were well known: passage of mouse-adapted strains of scrapie
>through hamsters altered their transmissibility on back passage to
>rodents (19,20); human strains of kuru or CJD did not transmit to
>ferrets or goats until passaged through primates or cats (21); and a
>bovine strain of BSE did not transmit to hamsters until passaged through
>mice (22).  Alternatively, if BSE originated from a spontaneous mutation
>in cattle, experimental studies of species susceptibility to this new
>strain of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) had not
>sufficiently advanced to predict that humans would not be susceptible...
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?
cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9837794&dopt=Abstract
 
etc...
 
It's a rare problem but a very upsetting one, and there ARE questions of
what is contagious, to what degree, and to whom.  I'd like to see testing
of at least all noticeably diseased cattle, deer, elk, and rabbits and
those who test positive not being able to be used in human or animal
foods.  Testing -- which is easy, fast, and affordable -- would be most
fair to the consumers as well as the producers.
 
[Moderator's note: I don't think the typical BSE test used in the United
States is particularly fast at all, as far as I've researched.  BIG]
[Posted in FML issue 4375]