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Investigating Chronic Wasting Disease
windows writes "The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch has an article in today's newspaper on efforts by many states to test for chronic wasting disease. The disease affects deer and elk, and is similar to Mad Cow Disease in how it destroys brain tissue giving it a spony appearance under a microscope. Due to the rapid spread of the disease recently, most states are enlisting the assistance of hunters to provide brain stems of deer, to test for the disease. The purpose of this study is just to determine how far geographically the disease has spread. It is not yet understood how the disease is spread or if it is a threat to cattle or humans."
They know it's carried in the brain and tissue of the spinal cord. If you don't cut into the brain or spinal cord when butchering the animals, you have nothing to worry about. You can handle all the meat from the animals that you want with no effects to you at all.
Doh! I changed Egan for Sterling in the text but not in the subject... Time for bed...
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
As mentioned in the article, CWD has recently been found in Wisconsin. It's been all over the news here. Hunter turnout is down 20%, I believe.
Here's one article from the local paper.
Well, I'll take a stab at this troll...
Obviously you know nothing about hunting. Most hunters go out to fill their freezer and feed their family.
Hunting is an inexpensive way to feed a family and thin out an overpopulated herd. Why let the deer die of overcrowding and starvation? Overcrowding leads to many types of disease also. I don't know if CWD is due to overcrowding, but it does accelerate it's growth.
Many hunters (myself included) donate meat that won't fit in my freezer to shelters and churches. Solves more than one problem (herd population and feeding hungry).
Also, as any bowhunter knows, deer not far from defenseless.
It affects the nerve tissue, not necessarily just the central nervous system, and nerves pervade the body. Also, while it only seems to affect nerves, that doesn't mean that a virus or prion that causes it isn't present in other body tissue.
The parts that ought to frighten you don't necessarily seem that bad until all of the factors are taken in at once:
1) total incurability of infected people/animals.
2) near indestructability of prions (1100F for hours, etc.)
3) ability of TSE's to cross species (scrapie in sheep, BSE in cattle, CJD in people, TME in mink, PSE in pigs, etc.) and it's all the same group of diseases. They differ in the speed that they cause damage, but that's about it.
4) The US meat/poultry industry practice of rendering slaughterhouse remains and *DOWNER CATTLE* into feed for other animals and poultry. This rendering process always includes brain and spinal cord tissue in the resulting product.
Basically, if the US meat industry hasn't found BSE in cattle, it's because it doesn't want to. The fact that downer cattle are never checked for BSE should piss just about everyone off. When Dr. Richard Marsh at the University of Wisconsin injected US cattle with TME infected US mink tissues, the cattle didn't act like the British cattle, they simply collapsed, looking like any other downer cow.
The US industry takes those downer cows, never checks to see what might have brought them down, grinds them up, brains and all, and feeds them to chickens, pigs, other cattle.
The scariest part is that slower forms of CJD (the human disease) look exactly like Alzheimer's and other forms of progressive dementia. In a Yale study, 6 of 46 Alzheimer's patients (13%!) were CJD positive at autopsy.
CWD (deer, elk, etc.) is almost certainly picked up from raiding contaminated feed meant for livestock. At least, that's my marginally informed position on the topic. It has to be injested somehow and it's a distorted animal protien so these wild herbivorous animals have to be consuming animal proteins to get sick.
The European Union has now banned all animal products in livestock feed, but the US FDA resists this simple and absolutely necessary step to halt the progress of the perfect pathogen throughout the United States.
An article that does a much better job of describing these problems and substantiating these arguments is at: "mad cows and englishmen". I hope it worries you and that you tell someone else about it. Even better, tell your congresscritter about it and what you think about it.
Regards, Ross
This is a decent article that addresses how to clean a deer with caution and respect to CWD:
Cut with Caution: How to safely field dress deer
Still, there's no evidence that this particular disease can be caught by humans, but personally I would minimise my risk, by having the safer cuts of meat, atleast. YMMV.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Interesting that this is a story today, because yesterday a group of Canadian elk ranchers announced a class action suit against the Canadian gov't for failing to take action against the spread of CWD. More details are here.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
WI DNR site has a FAQ and other info on CDW here
I live in Wisconsin and while I do hunt, I don't hunt religiously every year. My family owns our own land to hunt from which provides local property taxes. We bought local supplies to build the cabin and tree stands. We eat out most every night and buy local groceries when we don't. We paid a local company to have a well dug and put in a septic system. We frequent a number of local taverns and spend too much on beer and even more on tips. We've been hunting in the area of a number of years now, and the locals know us all by name.
I didn't go hunting this year.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
The University of Wisconsin is doing some pretty major research on this topic, and I believe it to be leading research in the field right now. The central location for public information on the topic at the UW is here.
Out of order?! Fuck, even in the future nothing works...
Well, you could just let them starve to death. Once the population grows large enough, there will be insuffcient forage for them all, resulting in a big die off during the winter, assuming some idiots don't try to prop up their population by dropping bales of hay and putting out deer chow. If they don't want hunters to control the population by culling the herd, nature can do a sufficently through job if left to its own devices.
The problem with that approach is that it tends to wipe them out. For example, about 15-20 years ago over half of the deer population of Utah died in one hard winter, in spite of heroic feeding efforts. Without the feeding efforts it's likely the number would have been close to 80%. That wasn't because there were twice as many deer (or 10 times as many) as could be sustained by the land; the excess population was less than 10% (the excess was due changes in Department of Wildlife Resources hunting policies).
See, in a normal winter, the deer are generally eating very low-quality feed by the time spring comes and the snows recede to uncover the leftover grasses. If it's a hard winter, or if the population is too high, they more or less run out of food some time before spring and a portion of the herd will starve. However, if you add a hard winter to overpopulation then the deer will exhaust even the poor food sources (bark and the grass they can dig for) and even the strongest and most able members of the population will be hit hard, and a huge percentage of the herds will die. According to a report I read that extrapolated from the above-mentioned fiascp: 25% overpopulation, six extra weeks of snow and no feeding would cause 95% of the population to die before spring.
That's not all, either. Starving deer do a lot of damage to the forest, chewing all the bark off of trees from ground level up to as high as they can reach (5-6 feet), eating the tips of tree branches and ripping up meadows as they paw at the snow trying to get to what grass lies beneath. This hurts other animals and slows the herds' recovery as well.
Before man got involved, the population didn't get too high because of natural predation (mountain lions, brown bears, the occasional grizzly, coyotes and a few wolves) but those same predators tend to kill a lot of our sheep and cattle, so we've eliminated most of them (I spent a few hours yesterday working on the coyote population). Given the elimination of natural predators, if humans didn't hunt to keep the deer, elk and moose populations within bounds, winter kills would be extremely severe and we'd have far, far fewer of the animals than we do. Wildlife managers try to determine what the optimal average population is and then use hunting to keep the actual population at about 85-90% of that level (as a buffer against hard winters).
It's paradoxical, but true, that without controlled hunting our big game populations would be far, far smaller. Nature would provide her own balance, all right, and that balance would be one of very small, very inbred herds clustered around the few reliable overwinter food sources.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If the above doesn't convince you, lets look deeper into the problem. The definition of "vector" says...
vector (vek'ter) n.
1. Mathematics. 2. Pathology. An organism, such as a mosquito or tick, that carries disease-causing microorganisms from one host to another.
3. Genetics. A bacteriophage, plasmid, or other agent that transfers genetic material from one cell to another.
4. A force or influence.
5. A course or direction, as of an airplane.
So definition #5 is one vector without magnitude. But more interestingly, definition #2 is yet another likely meaning for his usage of "vector" in the parent post. Both definitions would be gramatically correct, opposite what you are implying.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/jul02/60546.asp
As previous posts have mentioned, prions are nearly indistructible. Multiple cases of human CJD have been proved to be transmitted by surgical instruments that were 'sterilized' by standard techniques after being used on a patient later diagnosed with CJD. My point is: we are well advised to be extremely cautious where potential transmission of prions is at issue.
The previous post regarding 46 brain biopsies of Alzheimer's patients, among which 6 cases were 'positive for CJD' is puzzling. The microscopic look of the two diseases is completely different. CJD brain tissue looks like Swiss cheese under the microscope, while Alzheimer's brains show neurons replaced by 'neurofibrillary tangles.' These look like bits of brown stringy stuff where the neuron body used to be. Clinically, however, the diseases both cause dementia. Normally the time course of CJD, from first symptom to complete dementia, is much shorter (weeks to months) than Alzheimer's (years).
Hope this gives people some things to think about.
Marcus
The idea that there is a slower more insidious form is very strongly backed by studies of Kuru ( a disease of cannibalistic Fore highlanders in Papua New Guinea).
There were three distinct groups of people who died - people who died in the first wave had one genetic profile, in the middle wave, another , and in the final wave, up to 40 yrs later, a different genetic profile again.
Also, all those who have died from nvCJD thus far have been homozygous for a gene known to give shorter incuation periods for diseases like this (such as Kuru and the heridary forms of CJD and Gerstmann-Streussler-Schinker).
Morf (CJD research geek)
-- Why should I question authority?!
New Plague Indeed.
...and if you are one of the few left in 2025 ,not much outside the memory of your own loved ones is going to mean much I would think.
:)
What many here are joking about is the beginning of a plague like has never been witnessed before.
Initial infections were first noted in New Guinea in the '50's. Called Kuru then it was transmitted as a result cannibalism, (Natives would eat dead relatives) and having 100% mortality. Since that time Scientists have known about prions and the danger they represent but have always maintained prion disease was self-limiting (100% mortality) within one generation.
The problem is the disease just won't go away: Witness England in the 1980's. There, again, it was felt the disease was the result of feeding animal protiens infected with Prion to herbivores. The public response by government officials was the same: destroy infected animals in a big show to convince the public 'something was being done' but in fact the real problem is of course self--limiting (100% mortality). Besides, had not the ignorant British fed animal protein to herbivores nothing would have come of it at all.
Now we enter the 1990's and our old friend is back--only now something very ominous has occurred. You see a Missouri Deer hunter, up until about 1998 or so considered himself lucky if he could get a 'Doe Tag' or a 'Bonus Tag' and thereby legally take more than one deer per season. But now, all of the sudden, all a hunter need do, in Missouri, is simply request a bonus Tag and he will be given one - for a modest fee of course. Now in Missouri no deer Hunter need be lucky to bag all the deer he wants.
What may we infer from all of this?
1) Prion have not gone away.
2) They are not self limiting-but they are 100% fatal.
3) Prions are now in our food chain.
4) No viable explanation has, as yet come forth as to how North American 'wild' herbivores have contracted prion disease.
5) Certain sectors of the Government are more than mildly alarmed hoping the American Deer Hunter will buy them some time to figure what to do. (At what cost to the hunter and his family?)
6) World Health organizations are now holding their collective breath and watching Great Britain for possible massive human prion infections to begin to manifest.
Now for the real Soothsayer of Doom stuff:
Fast forward to the year 2025--England has been quarantined for seven years (nothing goes in nothing goes out) The crematories are running night and day. In Asia mass starvation has begun as prion infection has entered the Piscean as well as other food chains. In Europe and the United State martial law is declared when the lies and dissembling is no longer effective. As the deaths and bodies pile up, diseases thought long dormant receive new life and also join the rampage in an unrelenting slaughter which will leave half to three-quarters of the earths animal life forms dead.
Its already started and nothing is going to stop it-certainly not the Missouri Deer Hunters.
Of course we could agree I am just another raving, lunatic, crackpot soothsayer of doom, forget about all this prion crap and go grab a hamburger at McDonalds
Just another Anonymous Coward
BSE, or Mad Cow Disease, as the press has dubbed it, appears to have been transferred from sheep to cattle. About twenty-five ago Great Britain began allowing feed processors to use steamed sheep bone meal in cattle feed. BCE began to appear in bovines a few years later.
The disease in sheep is known as scrapie and has been known for around 250 years, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA even has an active program intended to eliminate scrapie. I am not aware of any definite link between scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.
How scrapie was transmitted to elk and deer doesn't seem to be clear, but deer are distant relatives of goats and sheep. It does seems clear that politics is the reason for the name Chronic Wasting Disease, just as the press has insisted on Mad Cow Disease, instead of referring to the true origins of the disease and admitting that it originated in sheep.