PrepperMed UPDATE: Evidence Shows Chronic Wasting Disease In Deer Transfers To Primates

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a disease of hoofstock wildlife (deer and the like).currently spreading through North America.  Affected animals look … well, like this:

Doe with CWD. Thanks to brokinhrt2 for the image.

Why should preppers care?

There’s been no proven case of CWD being transmitted to a human… yet.  But: 

UPDATE:  There is now evidence of CWD transmission to other primates.  Some researchers at Calgary started feeding and introducing by skin wounds (such as someone prepping a deer carcass might get) meat from CWD deer to monkeys.  After about five years, all the monkeys tested were in the process of developing CWD, and some of them were beginning to show symptoms. (1)

The CWD of deer and elk is thought to be a variant of the same prion (more on prions in a bit) that causes Mad Cow (officially Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) disease in cattle, and Mad Cow does get transmitted to people who eat the cattle.  And it kills them, through neurodegeneration. It is also thought to be essentially the same prion that causes kuru in people. Kuru, called the ‘laughing disease’ used to be endemic among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and was a major killer.  The Fore mostly passed it along by ritual cannibalism, but it is suspected they got it originally by eating sheep contaminated with the sheep version, scrapie.

So, even though there’s no human transmission of CWD proven to date, you wouldn’t catch me eating one of those deer.  Since many preppers have eating wildlife as part of their plans for some scenarios, in my eyes that makes CWD relevant to preppers.

Also, since it’s in wild hoofstock and all hoofstock seem to pass these prions around, cattle might pick it up from them. Monitoring for and vigorous culling of cattle with Mad Cow has made it very rare in the current population of cattle, but the disease is still there in the wild populations ready to make a comeback.

How is it transmitted?

All of the diseases named above are prion diseases.  Prions aren’t living things like bacteria.  They’re proteins.  The problem is that they are otherwise normal proteins that are folded wrong; and once they’re in your cells they cause other copies of this protein that you make to fold wrong too, creating more prions.  The prions interfere with neural function, causing a lot of brain cells to die and eventually leading to death.

The bad news is, prions are way tougher than living things.  Heating to food cooking temperatures doesn’t destroy them. They last for a very long time on surfaces, even outside in the weather.  Basically you’ve got to treat them with strong chemicals to destroy them, which doesn’t exactly work if you’re worried about prions in your dinner.

This might look delicious, but it wouldn’t be prion-safe. Thanks to WikiForAfrica*

In the ‘sort of good, sort of bad’ column we have the fact that prion diseases usually take years to build.  That’s the only thing that saved thousands of cases in the Britain outbreak; many beef cattle are eaten early in their lives so don’t have many prions even if they’ve been infected.  The down sides of that is it’s hard to really eradicate the disease from infected herds because the young animals can pass it around; and you can’t tell which young animals are developing it except by slaughtering them.  Kind of puts a No Go on the plan to keep and breed only prion-free cattle.  Also, people tend to eat deer that are several years old (especially if they are trophy hunters), so game animals may pose a greater risk.

The good news is, it seems you have to eat a fair bit of it to develop the disease, and it mostly resides in neural tissue. If you’re careful about how you butcher, not cutting across through the backbone or opening the skull, the safety of the meat goes way up.  Removing lymph nodes if you can helps too; that’s another reservoir.  Beef and venison eating is also much safer if you avoid commercially ground meat.  Large-scale meat packers don’t just butcher one steer, grind him up and make burger.  They throw bits from hundreds of animals into each batch of meat, so you’re getting exposed to a lot of animals with every bite of burger.  None of this is a guarantee though; the researchers in Calgary (1) just fed meat from CWD infected deer that weren’t yet showing obvious signs of disease to some of the monkeys, and the monkeys got CWD. 

How about sampling a few hundred cattle for lunch? Thanks TheGirlsNY** for the pic.

Another aspect of this CWD problem is that it brings more government intervention into  land management.  For example, places out west that are having serious infestations have mandated controlled burns.  (Infected animals shed prions in their spit, ‘buffalo chips’ and carcasses, and burning vegetation greatly reduces how much of the prion other animals eat, which is thought to reduce new infections.)  If you’ve got a BOL, that might be something to keep an eye on.  At The Place, we set out game cameras to keep an eye on things.  One thing I check for is the apparent health of the deer.  They like to stick their noses in the cameras, so I can see them well enough to know that they’re not showing signs of CWD.

It also increases government oversight of hunting.  Missouri allowed ‘virtual’ check-ins for deer for a few years, but now make you show up at a checking station so they can sample the deer herd to monitor the extent of the problem.  The tightest scrutiny goes to high-fence breeding and contained hunting operations where they raise semi-tame deer with giant racks and charge thousands of dollars to let people hunt the ‘game’.  That’s because these operations are known to be the best ways to spread the disease, with their crowded, contained herds.  They also pass the disease on to neighboring wild herds.  Yah, thanks so much for the CWD in north Missouri, high-fence hunt operators.

Check-in station where wildlife managers are sampling to check for CWD. If you’re in north Missouri in November, expect many dead deer in the back of pickup trucks.

Government monitoring for CWD helps wildlife managers understand the risks in particular areas, and they adjust their regulations accordingly.

At any rate, if wild game is part of your survival strategy, or control of cattle herds slacken as government management fails, or if you’ve got a BOL you don’t want the government nosing about, you might keep an eye on the CWD situation.  I’d add ‘if you hunt now’ to that, but at least here the current hunters know the score.  And if you were tempted to have a fried brain sandwich … maybe not.

(1) Stefanie Czub, Walter Schulz-Schaeffer, Christiane Stahl-Hennig, Michael Beekes, Hermann Schaetzl and Dirk Motzkus. (2017) First evidence of intracranial and peroral transmission of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) into Cynomolgus macaques: a work in progress. PRION 2017 CONFERENCE ABSTRACT. http://chronic-wasting-disease.blogspot.com/2017/06/prion-2017-conference-abstract-first.html 

*By WikiForAfrica (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

**TheGirlsNY [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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