Ongoing Research on Transmission of CWD to Humans

[MuleyFever]

That said, with the current info available, I am far more concerned with tick exposure and the myriad of nasty diseases they carry than CWD.

Like the one where they make you allergic to red meat. That's way more concerning to me right now than CWD. And I dont even live where the Lone Star Tick does.

 

[LuvsFixedBlades]

It sounds like ticks may be able to pick up the prions as well as the other diseases the bastards can carry.

That's a lovely thought.

Now I'm never going turkey hunting again, lol

 

[Rick M.]

Nobody has been attacked other than you being offended and snarky because someone doesn't share your view. Carry on with your cwd whataboutism.

It has nothing to do with someone not sharing my view. It's about responses being off-topic and deliberately condescending and unproductive. I'm trying to keep the thread on track. There are boneheads in this forum that want to turn every discussion into a political shitshow. In this discussion, you happened to be one of them, whether you own up to or not. It's 100% your problem if you found my response to be offensive or "snarky". I haven't been and am still not offended. There has been great discussion in here, despite some posters' attempts to take it off the rails. I think my calling you out just chapped your ass, and you are unable to move past it.

How about we start over? How difficult would something like this have been?
Topic: Potential for CWD to be transmissible to humans - will it impact the way you hunt?
diamond10x: "I think the risks of CWD are overstated, and it will not change the way I hunt."

See that? A response free of dogwhistling or meaningless tangents. Had you done something like that, we wouldn't be going back and forth. It would've been a mature "disagreement", and added something of value to the conversation. In the future, maybe you can attempt to disagree with someone, while staying on topic, without the passive-aggression. Take care, friend.

 

[Customweld]

That's a lovely thought.

Now I'm never going turkey hunting again, lol

That was in the Rokcast as well about the 1:17.00 mark.

 

[Rick M.]

I'm careful in how I process the animal to not cut into the spine/glands/brain until I'm finished removing and isolating meat.

I will test my kills because I feed the meat to my family. If it comes back negative, that's good enough for me. I've eaten so much wild game without testing over the years, it's likely I've eaten animals that have had it.

If it jumps to humans, we will all have a bigger problem than how it will affect hunting.

That said, with the current info available, I am far more concerned with tick exposure and the myriad of nasty diseases they carry than CWD.

Tick exposure is big one for me as well. They're really bad up here. Whether I'm fishing, scouting, mushroom hunting, or just hiking and camping, I always seem to have at least a couple on me when I check myself. I had one drop right into my buttcrack last year while bank fishing . Always do a once over for ticks if you live in the midwest or the northeast. I read that 1 in 3 ticks in MN carry Lyme! Crazy.

Speaking of ticks, the university recently published a study about ticks potentially spreading CWD.

Ticks may be able to indirectly spread chronic wasting disease

www.cidrap.umn.edu

Edit: The study was actually conducted by UW Madison, not UMN.

 

[Rick M.]

If it is ever found that it can make the jump to cattle...that will change the way I hunt significantly! Deer and elk would be irradicated everywhere I hunt!

No doubt. If it becomes transmissible to cows and pigs and starts to have an impact on the food supply chain, say goodbye to "deer management". They will cull like crazy and I'd imagine every state would have a lottery for tags and spikes would be the new 8 point. This is just another reason I think it's a good idea to minimize spreading it.

 

[GotDraw?]

No doubt. If it becomes transmissible to cows and pigs and starts to have an impact on the food supply chain, say goodbye to "deer management". They will cull like crazy and I'd imagine every state would have a lottery for tags and spikes would be the new 8 point. This is just another reason I think it's a good idea to minimize spreading it.

Cat is outta the bag, this will never be controlled by trying to kill off deer, etc.
Too many of them, prions too distributed, too long lived...
JL

 

[Gutshot007]

I understand as hunters the concern of consuming meat from animals testing positive for cwd , but to say MPR (minnesota public radio) and Mike Osterholm are "a-political " is like saying any mainstream media doesnt have an agenda . Its where studies and information comes from that unfortunately does have some degree of bias . Look up "covid in iowa deer" more researchers and studies . The "science" promoting concerns of covid in whitetails close to hunting season during the pandemic . Yes i have concerns of cwd , but i also believe there is also a fare amount of fear mongering and sensationalism going on .

 

[Rick M.]

I understand as hunters the concern of consuming meat from animals testing positive for cwd , but to say MPR (minnesota public radio) and Mike Osterholm are "a-political " is like saying any mainstream media doesnt have an agenda . Its where studies and information comes from that unfortunately does have some degree of bias . Look up "covid in iowa deer" more researchers and studies . The "science" promoting concerns of covid in whitetails close to hunting season during the pandemic . Yes i have concerns of cwd , but i also believe there is also a fare amount of fear mongering and sensationalism going on .

I suppose no source is a good enough source these days, with everyone combing over their "approved political sites" checklist before allowing themselves the bandwidth to actually reason about the research and move into civil discussion. Regardless of your feelings about MPR being the source, the study itself is being done through the University of Minnesota's Center for Disease Research and Policy. There is no "fear-mongering" involved in the discussion, even when they move past the CWD portion of the talk.

With respect to Mike Osterholm:
"Dr. Osterholm is Regents Professor, McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, a professor in the Technological Leadership Institute, College of Science and Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the Medical School, all at the University of Minnesota."

His credentials speak for themselves. If you are claiming that he's some political hack simply because Biden appointed him to his Covid-19 advisory board, and that all of his research and professional knowledge should be cast aside, then there's not much to discuss. Was there some other incident that prompted you to feel that Dr. Osterholm and his research department shouldn't be trusted? Does he have something to gain politically by researching the potential for CWD to infect humans and livestock? Do you think he wants to drain money from the state of Minnesota with some anti-hunting agenda? Is there a reason that you put science in quotation marks that you'd like to elaborate on? Lastly, of course CWD talk will increase as hunting season approaches. Trying to spin that as some politically motivated anti-hunting slant is just as silly as claiming discussion of bag limits and water pollution levels as fishing season approaches is. Come on, dude. Not everything is a conspiracy.

And FWIW, MPR is local (for me), doesn't hash up the same garbage I see in national media every day, isn't divisive / fear-based, and does a great job promoting community education and involvement. They cover cultural stuff that may cause some to recoil, but to discount an entire study, and entire university department, just because the local public radio station that conducted the discussion isn't solidly right wing, is silly at best, partisan-cowardice at worst. Even conservative havens such as Utah have public radio (UPR).

I did indeed look into some CWD information in Iowa. It would have been more productive if you yourself found a similar study to discuss, but alas, you did not. However, I can find nothing in Iowa (coming from Iowa State or Iowa) that says CWD is a non-issue. In fact, Iowa State University offers guidelines for dealing with CWD (handling meat, disposal, sampling, etc.), and actually recommends referring to the CDC for more information (), in which we both know people on here have zero trust in (as of 2020, conveniently). Also, I used to live in Iowa, and they absolutely do ramp up the CWD discussion as hunting season approaches, as every state wildlife agency does.

Chronic Wasting Disease in Iowa

Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, is a neurological disease infecting wild white-tailed deer in Iowa and other members of the Cervidae family in North America including mule deer, elk, moose, and caribou. This page provides information on the current status of the disease in Iowa, references to...

naturalresources.extension.iastate.edu

Iowa's White-tailed Deer and CWD

White-tailed deer are as synonymous with the ‘acreage living’ experience as fences and ragweed. And today, new challenges like that posed by Chronic Wasting Disease are elevating those responsibilities and require wide engagement in ensuring deer continue to thrive in Iowa.

www.extension.iastate.edu

 

[Johnny Tyndall]

I'm not trying to be Rokslide Bill Nye, but a quick look in Google Scholar turned up Exposure Risk of Chronic Wasting Disease in Humans (2020). The long quote below is worth a read, but one thing that stuck out is that CWD prions are actually found throughout the animal, not just in the CNS. I've never had an animal tested and I'm not sure that I'll start, but that's just an assessment of the odds: seems unlikely but not impossible that it will transmit to people and unlikely but not impossible that I'd be one of the first cases. Put them together and I have way riskier behaviors to address first.

1. Introduction​

Prion diseases are fatal transmissible neurodegenerative diseases thought to be caused by conformational conversion of cellular prion protein (PrPC) to pathological prion protein (PrPD) and its accumulation in both humans and animals [1]. In humans, prion diseases are categorized into three different forms: sporadic, genetic and acquired [2,3]. While sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (sCJD) is the most prevalent form of human prion diseases, the acquired forms have generated a lot of fear, in particular over concern of zoonotic transmission through consumption of infected animals. The animal prion diseases comprise scrapie in small ruminants [1,4], bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle [5], transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME) in mink [6], feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE) in cats [7], spongiform encephalopathy in camels [8] and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids [9].
Zoonotic transmission is a theoretical concern for all prion diseases, but, to date, the only documented transmission to humans has been from BSE-infected cattle. In the late 1980s, the outbreak of BSE (or mad cow disease) in cattle, and its transmission to humans through the food supply, resulted in a new form of prion disease, called variant CJD (vCJD), and caused 231 human deaths [10,11]. This has raised a concern for zoonotic transmission of other animal prion diseases, in particular CWD, as prevalence of this prion disease is rising.
CWD was first described in 1967 in a captive mule deer and later identified in black-tailed deer and Rocky Mountain elk in wild-life farms in Colorado and Wyoming [9,12]. In 2001, CWD was described in white-tailed deer in Nebraska and Dakota [13], and, in 2005, it was described in moose in Colorado [14]. Recently, CWD was also described in reindeer in Norway [15].
As the most infectious and contagious of all prion diseases, CWD is efficiently transmitted among cervids by both direct and environmental contacts [11]. Unlike BSE, CWD prions (PrPCWD) are distributed throughout the body of the diseased animal, including the peripheral and central nervous system, muscles, antler velvet and blood [16]. PrPCWD is also shed in saliva, feces and urine [11,17] and can persist in the environment for many years, increasing exposure risk to all animal species within the ecosystem. This shedding, plus the fact that CWD occurs in wild migrating animals, makes its management more challenging than BSE, where banning specific risk material or contaminated feed was sufficient to reduce cases [18,19]. Attempts to control CWD spread include non-selective culling of the animals in endemic areas, regulations on the number of animals to be raised in a farm, guidance on carcass handling, mandatory testing of hunter harvested animals, feed bans, and prohibitions in importing cervids [20]. Despite these measures, CWD incidence continues to rise.
A major concern for human exposure to CWD comes through direct consumption of venison, but also consumption of other ruminants that might be reservoirs of adapted CWD prions [21,22]. Fortunately, there is a strong species barrier in most prion diseases, largely dependent on the degree of homology of PrP amino acid sequence between donor and recipient species. The barrier is not absolute though; it can be influenced by PRNP polymorphisms and different prion strains [23,24]. This is highly relevant, as studies are demonstrating the existence of several different CWD strains, each of which may have unique transmission properties towards humans.
As an added challenge, we do not know what the signs and symptoms of CWD would look like in humans. It might resemble sporadic CJD or present as something unlike any known human prion disease. In cervids, clinical signs of CWD include weight loss, isolation, and loss of fear towards humans. Polyuria, polydipsia, excessive drooling, ataxia and tremors are observed during the later stages of the disease [25,26]. Among cervids, the incubation period varies from 2 to 4 years [27]; if transmitted to humans, it could be decades.
In this article, we will review factors that could influence the transmission of CWD to humans, including risk of exposure, the influence of PRNP polymorphism and CWD strain on the species barrier, and transmission data from theoretical, experimental, and real-world scenarios. We will also present current surveillance data on human cases of prion disease and discuss how we might detect human presentations of CWD, should they arise.

2. Risk of Exposure​

Whether humans will succumb to CWD transmission depends, in part, on the risk of humans encountering CWD in the real world. Human exposure to high levels of CWD prions is most likely to occur through direct handling of infected cervid carcasses or meat byproducts and through consumption of venison, velvet or other cervid byproducts [28]. Unlike BSE, where prions existed primarily in brain and spinal cord, prions in CWD are found at higher titers in tissues that are more highly consumed, such as skeletal muscle, and have been detected in cervids that are still sub-clinical and therefore more likely to be consumed [16,29]. Environmental exposure of humans to CWD prions is also possible, given that PrPCWD is shed into the environment where it may remain infectious for decades. For these reasons, the prevalence of CWD and its geographical footprint are important factors.
Since the first description of CWD in the 1960s, there has been increasing geographic spread, with CWD now found in 26 states in the U.S., three provinces in Canada, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Finland [27,30]. In North America, the prevalence of CWD is variable, affecting up to 30% of free ranging animals in some areas, and as many as 80–90% of animals in captivity [26,27,31]. In Wisconsin, where prevalence of CWD is among the highest in the world, CWD cases in white-tailed deer doubled between 2010 and 2016, and male deer populations had prevalence of infection up to 40–50% with females at 20–30% [32]

 

[RockChukkar]

If it makes the jump, hunting and game management through license sales will be over. The sheer reduction in PR Act revenue will tank states' game budgets.

Both are excellent points.

 

[ByrdHunter]

Have any companies looked into developing and distributing rapid test kits for at home use? Million dollar idea $$.