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."

Comments

So

[TheFlu]

They don't know how it's spread or if it will hurt me, but I shouldn't worry about handling items possibly contaminated with the disease? Makes sense...

Re:So

[sickmtbnutcase]

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.

Re:So

[Qzukk]

Well, you turn the deer brainstems over to the government, and eat the rest of the deer. Five years later, some people knock on your door, and when you answer it, they shoot you and take your brainstem. Then they compare the brainstems, and see whether you contracted this disease from eating the deer you killed.

Ten years and millions of government dollars later, they announce their research findings: "While it appears that eating deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease will not cause you to be infected by the disease, our research indicates that deer hunters are at a high risk of sudden death."

Re:So

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yeah, nvCJD is also found in certain organ meats though, spleen, tonsils etc. So you should probably avoid organ meat. But it's a nerve disease, nerves go everywhere in the body, so there's possibly a risk from eating any part of the body; but some parts are far riskier than others.

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.

In other news...

[Sirion]

"[CRW] is similar to Mad Cow Disease in how it destroys brain tissue giving it a spony appearance under a microscope."

This just in: researchers have found symptoms of Chronic Wasting Disease in various Slashdot editors. Details at 11.

Greg Egan

[Jhan]

Perhaps one of my favorite SF writers, Bruce Sterling, was closer than I thought...

In "Sacred Cow" he postulated that there was a slower, more insidious form of BSE which only affected humans after decades... Resulting in >80% death tolls in Britain, >60% in the rest of Europe. 50% in the US. 20% in Japan. A modern black plague.

The western world collapses, India, Japan and China rise to control the world.

Re:Deers?

[sickmtbnutcase]

In Wisconsin we sure as hell care about deer. Not "deers" you bonehead. Deer hunting is a vital part of the economy of many states and important to the culture of the people in these states. Maybe if you lived there you'd understand, so don't go saying nobody cares about deer.

chronically wasted

[NineNine]

I'm chronically wasted. Does this mean they're gonna have to shoot me and test my brain stem. Geez, I hope not. Or, if it has to happen, I hope they do it when I'm really, really wasted. That way I won't feel it. Just an idea. Dude.

Squeeze my sponge and I'll squeeze yours

[Subcarrier]

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.

So how does it spread, then? The elks rub their brain stems together in the throws of passion?

Wisconsin has this problem

[McCrapDeluxe]

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.

Deer Population Control

[dochood]

Deer hunting is the best way to keep the herds thin and help prevent the spread of disease.

Some bunny-huggers out there think they are doing the deer a favor by trying to stop hunting and implementing deer-transfers from heavily human-populated areas, when they may, in fact, be contributing to the problem.

In Missouri, hunters take about 225,000 deer a year out of about 1 million or so. This taking of about one quarter of the herd has helped keep the numbers fairly steady. This steady hunting pressure keeps the herd at sustainable numbers in most areas.

The areas in MO that have the worst deer population problems are around the big cities (St Louis, Kansas City, and Jefferson City). People are constantly running into them with their cars in the suburbs. The conservation department tries to encourage bow hunting around these areas by selling up to 5 $5 "urban archery" permits per hunter. But it's hard to hunt (even bow hunt) where people are too close by, because a lot of city-folks seem to have a negative attitude towards hunting.

dochood
MO Deer Hunter

Re:Deer Population Control

[swillden]

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.

Re:Great...

[Cyno01]

I really dont get these eco-wanks who are all against hunting. The reason we have hunting is to fix our mistakes! I know that hunting has become an excuse for hicks to go shoot off their guns, but it does serve a purpose. The deer population needs to be kept in check, theres no argument for that. Years ago we fucked up and removed the natural checks, wolves, mt lions etc for fear of our livestock. The unfortunate consequence was that without predators the deer population exploded. Now we have too many deer, and because of too many deer problems arise, like chronic wasting disease. I think its wrong for hicks to go out and kill things for the sake of killing things, but without them we'd have carcases of starved and diseased deer everywhere, hundreds more (people) would die each year in deer vs car accidents, and our crops would be gone. I live in the middle of metro Milwaukee, i've had a deer in my front yard. Maybe in the deep suberbs, but you shouldn't have deer in your yard in the middle of the city! Hunting is just our way of trying to fix what we screwed up. I dont understand why people think piles of rotting deer carcases along the side of the road are preferable to sharpshooters in helos.

Re:Great...

[wolfgang_spangler]

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.

Stuff that matters?

[Kohath]

It's supposed to be News for Nerds, not News for Herds.

I just don't know how to respond to this article.

[t0qer]

So instead of trying to provide some insightful comment built on reason, i'll just go imaginitive and see what I come up with...

I'm guessing that the problem occurs first in domestic livestock then moves it's way down to the wild population. This is a great agurment for natural selection VS. controlled breeding, gene manipulation and cloning.

For whatever reason, us humans have the gall to think we can master in 20 years what took nature millions of years to perfect. Despite natural selection being cruel in both the animal world and human (small geeks get beat up/eat up by jocks) just the fact that it has worked over eons is proof alone that it is far better than any technology we as humans can develop.

I used to tell this story when I got drunk to people, it's funny so laugh..

Why alchohol makes you smarter.
Your brain is like a herd of buffalo. The process of natural selection makes the herd healthier because the wolves will kill the slower buffalo trailing the herd first. By killing off the sick and weak buffalo the herd is left with healthy stock to breed, thus introducing healthier buffalo's into the herd.
Your brain is like that hurd of buffalo when you drink. The alchahol kills off the slow and weak brain cells leaving only the healthy ones to reproduce, thereby making your brain a faster more efficient machine. This is why everybody feels a little stronger when drinking! /end joke
That little joke does have grounding in reality in that the domesticated animals were not bred for diesease resistance or agressiveness, but rather for docileness and meat. This in turn has made them more susceptable to dieseases that their wild cousins would normally laugh off.

Add to that equation the use of antibiotics and steroids in domestic livestock. It's been proven with humans that over time a diesease will mutate where it is no longer killed by an antibody. We then change it a bit, and the diesease mutates yet again. Steroids inhibit the production of white blood cells while strengthening muscles. Steroids don't kill the germ, they just make you feel like you have none. So germs can keep on breeding inside an organism all jacked up on steroids and it wouldn't even know it.

The hugely scarey thing is humans are now *considering* tweaking with our own genes, and despite that 3lb's of grey stuff we got on top of our heads, unless we irraditate the earth (in which case we ruin it) there is no way we are going to be able to stop the googleplex of 1 celled organisms that inhabit this earth from overthrowing us.

I guess the moral i'd like to make to all this is we need to "re-teach" ourselves to live in harmony with nature. Just because you destroy a forest, pave it, and put pavement over it doesn't mean you "conquered" nature. If it's not there how can you say it was conquered??

Just my 2cents.

TSE's are scary stuff.

[rossifer]

Chronic Wasting Disease, Mad Cow Disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease are all forms of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE's) and they really ought to frighten you.

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

Re:TSE's are scary stuff.

[Turing Machine]

but the US FDA resists this simple and absolutely necessary step to halt the progress of the perfect pathogen throughout the United States.

Err... you're a little behind the times. The FDA banned mammalian protein in livestock feed way back in 1997.

Re:TSE's are scary stuff.

[Turing Machine]

So, you think disinfo.com is a reliable source, do you? Most of us prefer to get our hard news from sites that don't have special "aliens", "conspiracies", "mind control", and "drugs" links in the sidebar.

Re:Great...

[wolfgang_spangler]

Maybe you have plenty of resources.

I suggest you take some of your resources down to the local food bank and feed some hungry people.

It is not ineffecient at all to kill a deer and butcher it and eat it. If the deer didn't exist and I had to feed it a ton of food for 2 years before I could slaughter it, then maybe.

On the other hand, I don't eat grass. Deer are very plentiful (very overcrowded), eat grass, and taste great. Venison provides nutrition for humans.

I realize you just have some aversion to killing animals for food, and that is fine. Good for you. But don't spread FUD about eating meat. In moderation (like any food product) it is good for you.

Keep yourself safe.

[quitcherbitchen]

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

The rise of civilization...

[dagg]

... "The deer had been acting strangely, so conservation officers shot it and sent samples of its brain to Galesburg to be tested."

To think, just a few years ago, that sentence would have stopped at "shot it". Now after shooting it, we send it's head to Galesburg. Civilization has come a long way.

Class action lawsuit..

[robbo]

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.

Re:Deers?

[Saxerman]

Deer hunting is a vital part of the economy of many states

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.

Re:Deers?

[Saxerman]

Uh, who in the world buys deer, from what I have gathered (Grandfather hunted) deer meat is tough as hell and a bitch to cook.

Considering what we spend every year to go hunting versus the amount of meat we actually bring back, it would be a lot cheaper to stay home and buy the finest steak for diner once a week. See my previous post for more details.

My family hunts for more reasons that just the meat. But the meat is part of the culture too. Venison (deer meat) comes in different flavors and textures which depend mostly on if the deer is healthy and eating properly. We make most of our venison into jerky and sausage, but we save the steaks and tenderloins which we eat on special occasions.

Savages such as myself can still take a certain pride in knowing that we have brought food in from out of the wilderness. And that meat we're eating... well, some reason, the deer I shot, tracked, field dressed, dragged out of the woods, and brought home, my venison, tastes better than any steak I've ever had.