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."

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?

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.

Stuff that matters?

[Kohath]

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

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.

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.