Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human neurological disease, has been linked to the consumption of mad cow-infected meat in other countries -- but never to eating wasting disease-infected tissues from deer and elk.

But researchers, fearing the prospect that wasting disease acts like mad cow disease, want to be sure people like Kurtis Royer, whose family regularly eats deer meat, are safe. He said he prefers to hunt the family dinner because it is cheaper than buying beef at the supermarket and free of chemicals.

"I like to hunt," Royer said. "For a $250 investment, we get three deer, and that's all our steaks, roasts, jerky. We can fill a freezer."

The research of records has the support of the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

"We're going to continue to work with state health officials and provide them with the necessary records," said Todd Malmsbury, a DOW spokesman.

Hunting licenses and death records will be compared to see if there is a higher prevalence of neurological disease among hunters versus nonhunters, said John Pape, an epidemiologist for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The study is similar to one in Wyoming, where the state's Game and Fish Department is providing records for analysis, said Dr. Brent Sherard, the state's health officer.

"We want to be sure there is no concern to human health because of chronic wasting disease," he said. "We have not found anything. We're actually in the early stages of this project."

So far, Wyoming has focused analysis on hunters in the southeast portion of the state, where wasting disease rates run higher than average.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife advises hunters to take precautions such as not eating or handling brain or spinal tissues and avoiding consumption of meat from animals that test positive for the disease.

DOW this year removed requirements that hunters submit heads for testing if the animals were slaughtered in game management units in northeastern Colorado, including Larimer County. The requirement allowed DOW to track infected animals in the past but is no longer needed because the agency is confident hunters will continue to submit heads for testing and pay the fee on their own, Malmsbury said.

There are incentives to do so, he added. Any hunter who bags an animal that tests positive is entitled to license-fee and other refunds, he said.

Royer, a licensed mental health therapist from Fort Collins, isn't too worried about contending with wasting disease because he hunts in Kansas, away from areas where the disease is prevalent. Still, he occasionally gets meat tested to be sure it is safe.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease remains difficult to understand, although the body of evidence about it is growing, said Christine Pearson, a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"In most of the cases, it doesn't really have a recognizable pattern of transmission," she said.

Colorado health officials recently completed an investigation that revealed 65 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Colorado between 1979 and 2002.

Death records in Larimer, Boulder, Weld, Morgan, Logan, Sedgwick and Phillips counties, where wasting disease runs higher than elsewhere in Colorado, were compared with the rest of the state's records to see if there was a higher incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There was not a higher incidence in the seven counties.

"Basically, this is what we in the business call a negative study," Pape said.

The study, which is expected to be published in coming months, analyzed more than 500,000 death certificates.

Had state researchers found a higher incidence of neurological disease in people who died in northeastern Colorado, it would have meant more study was needed, rather than providing firm evidence of a connection to wasting disease, Pape added.

"If the rates were higher, it would have certainly led to questions as to why," Pape said.

Overall, the state's rate of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is roughly one case per million, which is average, Pape said.