Mad deer disease

There was a scare about mad cow disease a couple years back in the UK, but one underreported story is the presence of another prion caused disease in deer in the midwestern USA.

Wasting disease in Deer:

CWD is highly contagious among cervids: deer, elk, moose, reindeer, caribou. There’s no known cure, and it’s always fatal. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warns us to avoid exposure to it, as no one knows whether humans can contract it or not. Unfortunately, once CWD comes to an area, it’s impossible to get rid of it...

the problem? the question if hunting and eating Venison could cause a simlar syndrome in humans. No creditable links yet, but the experts recommend don't eat the meat from the sick deer.

The link might be brain tissue: If I remember correctly, mad cow disease was spread to humans by meat contaminated by brain tissue, which is where the disease is located. Most hunters eat the meat but not the innerds of the deer they shoot, at least nowadays (in the past, poverty meant you ate everything but now often the venison is merely an addition to your food supply, so the brain/pancreas etc are discarded or fed to dogs. at least this was so when I lived in a deer hunting area of PA...maybe someone needs to check the dogs of deer hunters?)

However, the prions can spread to other animals via urine in the environment.

and then there is the question: is CWD from prions or just from a bacteria they can't identify?

Then there’s Frank Bastion’s theory that CWD is not caused by prions, but by a bacterium. Bastion, a medical doctor and biologist at Louisiana State University who specializes in TSE diseases, claims CWD is caused by a very small Spiroplasma bacterium that doesn’t have a cell wall. He believes the misfolded proteins are the result of CWD, not the cause of it. He says the lack of cell wall is the reason antibiotics, which target cell walls, don’t work.

summary:

It’s been in the United States for five decades, and we’ve still got lots of wild deer and elk, in some places too many, so it’s easy to turn a blind eye. What’s more, people haven’t contracted it. However, in states like Colorado, where CWD has existed for several decades and where prevalences are 40% or higher, cervid populations have declined precipitously. “CWD will continue to affect a treasured natural resource and might become a human health issue,” says Richards, “We’re not sure we can get ahead of it, but there’s also vast areas of the U.S. where no evidence of CWD exists. It’s up to us to do all we can to keep it that way.”