Caught my eye, because venison is rather tasty — the report from Tech Times:
Chronic Wasting Disease was first observed among Colorado deer in 1967. Since then, the neurological disease has spread to 24 U.S. states and Canada.
There have been no reports of human contamination so far, but a recent Canadian study has once again sparked worries that the disease could be contracted by humans.
In a long-term study at the University of Calgary, 18 macaques were exposed to the disease in different ways, including injecting infected material straight to the brain; feeding infected meat; skin contact; and intravenously.
Bottom line:
A report states that to date, three out of the five macaques fed with 5 kilograms (11 lbs.) of infected deer meat over a period of three years tested positive for CWD. In humans, such diet is equivalent to eating a 7-ounce steak each month.
What's even more alarming is that two of the three monkeys fed with deer meat exhibited symptoms of the disease such as anxiety, ataxia, and tremors.
One macaque shed one-third of its body weight over a six-month period, while two animals that had infected matter injected into their brains also developed CWD.
Good advice from a scientist:
"No one should consume animal products with a known prion disease," said Stefanie Czub, a prion researcher at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, who presented the partial findings of the study in Edinburgh, Scotland last May 2017.
Previously: Deer in Multiple U.S. States Test Positive for Chronic Wasting Disease, Leading to Restrictions
Related: Venison: The Luxury Red Meat?
Related Stories
Multiple states are preparing measures to monitor chronic wasting disease in their deer populations:
Despite rain and snow, thousands of Michigan hunters dragged their deer to check stations to be tested for chronic wasting disease — a condition that comes from the same family as "mad cow" disease.
"I was amazed that we had 150 deer come through the check station on the first day of gun season in Montcalm County," said Chad Stewart, Michigan Department of Natural Resources deer specialist. "Given the Wednesday opener and the bad weather, I was blown away."
Dollars generated from deer licenses and hunting-related purchases bring in millions in matching funds for habitat restoration and endangered species. They also help fund the testing for CWD, a demon of a disease that has been identified in 11 free-ranging Michigan deer and is feared to be on the verge of crossing over to humans. It just might alter the way we hunt forever.
"When they look back on the history of deer management in Michigan, these years will be considered pivotal to the culture of deer hunting," said Stewart. "I don't want people to think it's a death sentence for deer management. For now, there will be changes and additional restrictions. Change is hard to adapt to."
Montana drafting plans for hunt to monitor deer disease
Chronic wasting disease has been slowly spreading among deer, elk and moose in the Rocky Mountains, including Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. Symptoms include weight loss, listlessness and drooling.
Washington will restrict the import of deer carcasses from Montana.
Deer are regularly hunted across the United States, but some people pay exorbitant prices for imported deer meat:
Wintertime is a special time of year at Cafe Berlin, located just a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. This is when they roll out their menu of wild game, such as deer, wild boar, and quail. Regular customers have come to expect it. "They ask, weeks in advance, 'When does the wild game menu start? When does it start?'" says James Watson, one of the restaurant's chefs. And the star of that menu is venison. The restaurant serves venison ribs, venison loin, even venison tartar. It's food that takes your mind back to old European castles, where you can imagine eating like aristocracy.
You won't see venison in ordinary supermarkets. At Wagshall's, a specialty food shop in Washington, I found venison loin selling for $40 a pound. This venison comes from farms, usually from a species of very large deer called red deer. Much of it is imported from New Zealand.
Yet there's a very different side to this luxury meat. Less than two hours drive from Washington, Daniel Crigler has a whole freezer full of venison that he got for free. Crigler's home in central Virginia is surrounded by woodlands full of white-tail deer. For Crigler, they are venison on the hoof. And he loves hunting. "I love the outdoors. I love being out. But I also like to eat the meat," he says, chuckling. It's pretty much the only red meat he eats. And as he shows off the frozen cuts of venison in his freezer, this crusty man reveals his inner epicurean. "That's a whole loin, right there," he says. "What I like to do with that is split it open, fill it full of blue cheese, wrap it up in tin foil and put it on the grill for about an hour and a half."
And here's the odd thing about this meat, so scarce and expensive in big cities; so abundant if you're a hunter in Madison County, Virginia. Hunters like Crigler kill millions of deer every year in America, but the meat from those animals can't be sold: It hasn't been officially approved by meat inspectors. Also, the government doesn't want hunters to make money from poaching. Yet hunters are allowed to give it away, and many do. As a result, venison occupies a paradoxical place in the world of food. It's a luxury food that turns up in notably non-luxurious places.
Related: Arby's is Selling Venison Sandwiches in Six Deer-Hunting States
Deer in Multiple U.S. States Test Positive for Chronic Wasting Disease, Leading to Restrictions
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:05PM
You're not Jonesy.
Arrrrgh, there's ripley in my eye, and a shit snake is eyeing my asshole!@
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @11:11PM (7 children)
How about a field, or even at the butchers' test for prions?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by NewNic on Monday January 22 2018, @11:18PM (6 children)
Because it requires testing the brain matter.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 22 2018, @11:24PM (3 children)
How difficult would it be to use a cork screw to get some brain matter? Or some other brain matter extraction device?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 22 2018, @11:26PM (2 children)
> other brain matter extraction device?
Like a bullet, arrow, or hunting knife ?
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Monday January 22 2018, @11:42PM
"Please stop using large calibre weapons to hunt deer - we need more brain tissue left to test!"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:29AM
Well that's a technology combination I never thought I'd encounter - a diagnostic bullet: You fire it at the target, and as it impacts it grabs a tissue sample, tests for disease and transmits the results back to the shooter's phone / bluetooth enabled HUD sniper-scope.
I can almost see this becoming a thing for hunters in the US.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:45AM
Perhaps before grinding the brain matter up along with various other parts to make breakfast sausage, take some of that brain matter and reserve it for the proposed "field or at the butchers prions test." I know, it seems simple to me, but I am not a brain testing scientist, so I don't actually know what would be required.
Also, PSA: The article indicates that you should never inject yourself in the brain with infected deer flesh. The more you know.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @05:15PM
It is entirely possible to have that done. This past year I had to get my deer tested and the MN DNR had stations where you could bring them. I wouldn't trust an average deer hunter to do a proper field test but testing stations aren't uncommon in areas where there was an outbreak in some farmed animals in MN.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:24PM (3 children)
Don't inject infected deer matter into your brains.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @12:30AM
You say that like it is something easy.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Kilo110 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @05:29AM (1 child)
And also don't eat laundry detergent.... oh shit
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:17PM
I first read that as "or shit", and it made total sense, because the idiots who need warnings to not eat laundry pods would need to be told not to eat shit, too....
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:25PM (6 children)
Americans already have a chronic wasting disease. That's why we need all those illegal alien immigrants!!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:40PM
Comments like this call for an inspection of the original submission.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday January 22 2018, @11:45PM (3 children)
Wrong: it's a chronic fattening disease.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @12:20AM (2 children)
Beat me to it. GP has it wrong. In fact, maybe this is a cure for obesity!
I mean, it's not like most Americans use that thing in their head anyway. They already do monumentally stupid things like invasive surgery to lose weight, which never works anyway because stress is the root cause, not stomach size. Why not CWD?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:46AM (1 child)
Yes, stress about being too fat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:50PM
Yep. Also stress about flipping through the latest pop culture potboiler magazine and religiously sticking to some sham fad diet. Stress about the diet not working past the first week. Stress about failing to religiously stick to it. Stress about how much the new fad diet costs.
But mostly the stress that comes with being part of the precariat.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday January 23 2018, @01:41AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:03AM (5 children)
[\----+-----]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:54AM (4 children)
...on something which probably works: then go right ahead, so long as it's your money.
When one is spending other's money one has a responsibility to be more confident than "it wouldn't be surprising if this wasn't burning millions for no reason".
Imagine if millions were spent preventing its transmission, killing the infected, making meat testing mandatory, before someone realized that it was harmless in humans. You, the same person who seems to advocate doing just that, would probably make a similar snarky comment asking why then didn't bother to check.
Fuck off. To many astrology, antisemitism, ghosts, magnet therapy, black inferiority, &c are obvious and plain as day. If only they actually checked whether their expectations and hunches were true.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:35AM (3 children)
My imagination is not failing to grasp medical research. It is important to maintain the safety of the food supply, while simultaneously focusing spending on actual threats, and your suggestion otherwise falls wide of the mark.
What's not quite as important is researching what happens to those who inject diseased animal paté into their brains. I submit that that might be a poor place to pour those millions. In the region where I live, this is not a common (nor uncommon, even) practice, and determining what happens to those who practice it kind of misses the point.
Why? Because injecting disease into the brains of a test species, and finding them to show no symptoms, doesn't mean the disease can't affect humans. And finding them horrendously infected when brain injected can't show that the disease would ever affect humans--even if you "assume" it does at that point, you're still dealing with the data for those with that brain-injection condition. Again, not a primary concern.
People here usually cook or jerk deer meat and then eat it, a more common ingestion route. Best practices mean getting the deer to a meatcutter quickly; the meatcutter keeps the deer in frozen conditions while it's processed to minimize the growth of pathogens. Even if, instead, you butcher the deer yourself outdoors on a hot summer day, next door to a sewage processing facility, and lick your fingers the whole time, this does not approximate injecting disease-cultured flesh into your brains.
If you couldn't get any infections by feeding sick dead deer to your test animals, raw nor cooked, I could see some research along the lines of "Well THIS will get an infection if ANYTHING will; Cletus, hand me that there brain syringe thingy...." But they seem to have a population of test animals that got nice and sick just eating disease sandwiches.
If I assume good faith, I will take it that you just perhaps misunderstood what aspect of the research I thought was the least surprising. And that's still why we do the research; to see the result, even if it doesn't always surprise us.
What might have surprised me would have been a result where the animals that ate the diseased venison got sick, but the ones that had it jacked straight into their brains became immune.
Surprise meter [-----+----/] for sure.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday January 23 2018, @05:40AM
The key there is that they injected the brains at the start (presumably) before the food wasn't affected. Basically an insurance policy: well maybe we won't be able to get results from food in the timespan we have (3 years), but there are probably people who eat venison more than that, so lets give the disease the best possible chance to take hold too just in case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:53AM (1 child)
requerdanos you don't get it. This used 12 animals. And you think the delivery mechanism was badly chosen?
12 animals died for this. Do you want 1,000 to be tortured by being rubbed against deer carcasses? And then killed - because you cannot re-use these now for science or food, so incinerated, utterly destroyed. Wasted.
You're perhaps no buddhist. "Fuck the monkeys" maybe?
Did you even read the summary? They used several delivery mechanisms. One was eating. It spread to those monkeys.
Humans DO eat venison and the bodyweight:eaten ratio is well within the freezers of families I know.
Do you understand how prions work? Because these self-replicate in deer through some form of touch or intercourse, or it wouldn't be spreading so fast. So, yes, we desperately want to find out if these will harm or spread among humans. Is it by touch? By saliva? By sex?
User number 5997. Disappointing. Maybe we'll turn into /. with comments like yours above. Try to think the other side through before spouting. You sound like a self-important white guy.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 23 2018, @04:25PM
Perhaps, perhaps not, but I appreciate your contribution to the conversation.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday January 23 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)
Before I started hunting this past season I was mowing my fields and found a dead deer skeleton. It had been there for a while, but was not there last year. Very strange.
This year I did notice there were a lot fewer deer out there. The rut was late due to the warm weather extending into November. It was one of the first seasons in a while that I didn't take any deer. I felt there just weren't enough of them to justify taking one. Most of my buddies also noticed the reduced numbers. Hopefully CWD is not affecting them here, but I'll have to wait until next year to see if their numbers rebound.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:44AM
I didn't know what these were the first time I found one.
Now I do.
It's... strange. Frightening. The birds mammals and insects still pick them clean, which actually kind of worries me, because a lot of stuff is downstream. Do I trust berries? Proooobably. Racoon? Not for now. Shame.