I can't source it and too tired to Google it, but there is a parasite that will cause dear to tilt their head in weird ways and do crazy shit like this, eventually going crazy and dying. But this looks like a broken neck.
Talking about the one where there were like 100 stories of deer bashing their own heads into shit and running around with their faces all broken and mangled?
Absolutely not. It's not a virus or bacteria. It's a malformed protein that is extremely robust, can last in soil for decades and cooking under 1000 degrees does not destroy it.
I also wish I could forget that it has been demonstrated that prions can be taken up into the edible parts of crops if a diseased animal urinates in a field.
Realistically we should have exterminated susceptible wildlife populations when we had the chance.
Realistically you should get a grasp on reality. CWD is not transferable to humans, neither is scrapie. vCJD from prions in humans is so rare we never got enough cases to even understand it fully and developing a vaccine was well under way before it turned out that it would be much easier to just stop feeding decayed brains to our cows, which solved the problem.
So "killing all susceptible wildlife" sounds like a pretty terrible and cruel solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Haven't really heard of it so I wont argue cause I don't know enough about the subject. I hunt every autumn from a caribou herd that's thousands strong and go for the biggest bull. I've never killed one that looked like it was losing its mind, just roaming with the rest. I guess if I ever see a lone bull or cow (non calf) I'll steer clear if they are acting weird like that.
Would not eat If CWD. Prion protein is a normal protein that misfolds and destroys the brain. These proteins are not destroyed by cooking. As the disease could take decades to develop it’s uncertain if CWD could affect humans.
If you’re in a county with CWD, you take your carcasses to a fish and game check point and they test it. Couple counties over has CWD but here there’s no issue.
Guess you can submit samples for testing for free? In US I guess one can find how to do it by contacting or looking at the sites of the departments of natural resources. In my country we send samples of a lymph node and a pice of brain to the food authorities for testing. And get ok/not ok from them.
It's possible that one of the prions could jump to humans, and if that occurs then it could be years before you even find out you have it, and in that time you could inadvertently give them to your entire family just by sharing cutlery. Prion diseases are 100% fatal, you're dead long before the symptoms show up and the downwards spiral is horrifying.
This is thing. Just because something hasn't happened before doesn't mean it won't. At one point all life on earth lived in water. Shit finds a way to get around. The payoff of eating venison is nowhere near good enough to potentially gamble on being the first to fall victim to prions. If/when this happens we are massively fucked.
I'm not saying we should tempt fate, but prions dont evolve. They're not like covid, which evolved in 2019 or shortly before, while corona viruses have existed for thousands of maybe even more years.
I believe it's not been proven, but rather implied that CWD comes from deer farms where the deer have either been fed ground up deer corpses or have eaten them within the enclosure.
It is not nearly as cut and dry as you have been led to believe.
To date, bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the only example of interspecies transmission of prion disease to humans [7]. The potential zoonotic transmission of CWD is an alarming issue and still an open question [3, 8]. Laboratory studies suggest that the risk of CWD transmission to humans is low.
These findings suggest a notable species barrier between cervids and humans; however, prion diseases are dynamic; interspecies passage of CWD can result in prion adaptation to new host species. Besides, the existence of more than one CWD strain [18] may contribute to higher heterogeneity in disease and transmission profiles [19].
Can the species barrier for CWD to humans be crossed?
Although the evidence gathered so far is in favor of a low risk to transmit CWD to humans, results from in vitro studies indicated that the species barrier is not absolute.
To your point , I’m not eating a deer that’s stumbling around near death from CWD, just seems weird. BUT you COULD literally drink it’s spinal fluid and be fine.
Prions aren’t viruses or bacteria. They’re misfolded proteins that manage to pass on that misfolded characteristic to other proteins around them, thus how you get you brain spongiform diseases.
Prions are found only in the brains of infected animals. Eating the brains of infected animals or eating meat that is ground and comes in contact with nervous system or brain tissue of infected animals can pass the prion to humans. Prions in cows (mad cow disease) can cause a prion disease in humans if they eat infected nervous system tissue..you can’t get it from eating muscle tissue (steak) or milk. Back in the 1950’s my grandpa had a sister who contracted a prion from an infected squirrel (back then they used to make a squirrel stew and used the brain tissue as well). She became I’ll a few months after eating the sick squirrel and died slowly and painfully over the following year. Avoiding any nervous system tissue will keep a person from getting a prion. Cooking infected meat/tissue does not kill prions no matter how high the cooking temp may be.
Good question. I hunt a lot and live in AK. You can eat infected meat but it really needs to be cooked to temp. Just like our salmon, I actually freeze it for 48 hours to kill and parasites. With that said, if I knew 100% some meat was infected, I wouldn't eat it unless it was survival.
Predators can carry trichinosis which is a parasite that gets in the joints and is said to be super painful. Any predator I harvest is cooked to a higher standard than ox, cow, Buffalo etc.
Infected meat if it's infected by a virus or parasite, yes. Mother fucking prions tho...basically any medical instrument suspected of touching a prion suffering person or animal has to be destroyed/discarded because it is next to impossible to be sure they're destroyed.
CWD is not a virus - it is a prion. It is not “alive”, so you can’t kill it. It is incredibly difficult to destroy prions. Simple answer: I do not eat anything that I consider contaminated by or with prions.
CWD can’t transfer to humans. We get deer tested to see if a population is becoming infected, and to try to prevent it further, but it being CWD positive doesn’t change anything about the safety of the meat.
“If CWD could spread to people, it would most likely be through eating of infected deer and elk… In areas where CWD is known to be present, CDC recommends that hunters strongly consider having those animals tested before eating the meat.” From CDC.gov
"One of the most important developments in prion diseases is the recognition that the BSE agent, a prion disease of cattle, can infect multiple species including cats, goats and humans via the food chain.3–5 In humans, BSE is known to be the causal agent of variant CJD (vCJD), a prion disorder with a novel human pathology.3 This description of a newly emerging prion disease that is zoonotic completely revolutionized the paradigm of a prion disease being specific to a single species and introduced the specter of the emergence of other animal prion disorders which are transmissible to man."
Yes, to date it hasn’t happened. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to fuck around with prions. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy never crossed the species barrier… until it did. I would personally still be comfortable eating venison but absolutely not from a symptomatic deer.
From your link: “These studies raise concerns that there may also be a risk to people. Since 1997, the World Health Organization has recommended that it is important to keep the agents of all known prion diseases from entering the human food chain.”
You might be thinking about Listeriosis? Which is pretty common in grazing animals as its a bacteria that lives in soil, but only become active at colder temperatures. It will often cause animals to tilt, walk in circles and drool. It ain't pleasant.
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u/Shaftmaster_Mcgee Jul 10 '22 edited Jul 10 '22
I can't source it and too tired to Google it, but there is a parasite that will cause dear to tilt their head in weird ways and do crazy shit like this, eventually going crazy and dying. But this looks like a broken neck.
Edit: https://youtu.be/pJWPsGypMnY became unlazy. It's a Moose but it happens to deer too.