Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting CWP transfer ?

Apologies if this is old news to everyone here: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-consumption-contaminated-venison-cases-deer.html

That is a BS article. The hunters do not know if they every ate CWD infected meat, they just hunted in an area that has cwd.
Hopefully maybe it will keep some sky is falling folks from applying in Wyoming since we are endemic area for cwd, lol.

How is it BS? They freely state that they don’t know just that there are circumstances suggesting a particular possibility. (Two men, both deer hunters who know each other and hunt the same area dying from a rare disease that’s a form of a disease spreading among deer.) They suggest more research is in order. That’s all, no sky is falling hysteria that I can see.

All kinds of uncertainties yet - both directions. Found this, but those were old farts like me who died- who knows how compromised their health/immune systems were? Or what other things they had in common - like some exposure at their lodge? . High levels of Humic acid in the soil also appear to destroy or bind the bad prions, reducing infection rates for the animals in those areas.

"Prions aren't microorganisms like bacteria or viruses; they're simply protein aggregates. Some prion diseases are caused by an inherited genetic mutation, while others are caused by exposure to infectious prions in food. Acquired prion diseases are triggered when a foreign, misfolded prion protein causes the body's own natural prion proteins to misfold and aggregate. In addition to chronic wasting disease, examples include scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or "mad cow disease") in animals and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. In humans, prion diseases can cause a variety of rapidly progressive neurological symptoms, such as difficulty walking and speaking, and dementia. These diseases are 100 percent fatal and there is currently no effective treatment.

"We suspected that a loop in the human prion protein structure may block the elk prions from binding, as the sequences did not appear to be compatible," Sigurdson said.

To test this hypothesis, Sigurdson and her team developed a transgenic mouse that expresses a prion protein that's identical to the human version—except for a small loop, which they swapped out for the elk prion sequence. When these mice were exposed to the elk prions, they developed chronic wasting disease.

In contrast, control mice expressing the normal human prion sequence resisted infection when exposed to same materials—just as humans seem to, even those who consume venison meat.

"This finding suggests that the loop structure is crucial to prion conversion and that sequence compatibility with the host prion protein at this site is required for the transmission of certain prion diseases," Sigurdson said.

Journal information: Journal of Clinical Investigation"

Another source:

"Aiken and colleagues tested the role of a major soil organic matter compound, humic acid, for its ability to bind chronic wasting disease prions and impact infectivity. The researchers examined a wide range of humic acid concentrations, representing the extensive spectrum of humic acid levels present in native soils. The findings suggest that soil organic material degrades chronic wasting disease prions. Incubation of chronic wasting disease prions with high concentrations of humic acids decreased both the chronic wasting disease prion signal and infectivity in mice, whereas lower levels of humic acids did not significantly impact protein stability or infectivity. According to the authors, the study provides new insights into soil-prion interactions, the persistence of prions in soil, and their bioavailability to grazing animals."

Still another study:

"While researchers have been experimenting with protein uptake into plants since the 1970s, Johnson and colleagues' laboratory study, published in iScience in December, takes those investigations a step further. They demonstrated that alfalfa, barley, and Arabidopsis thaliana, a small plant from the mustard family called thale cress and other names, all accumulated sufficient prions from contaminated soil in their above-ground tissues to cause mice that ingested the plant tissues to develop prion disease.

"There was a previous study that looked to see if plants could become surface-contaminated or potentially accumulate prions at all, and it looked like they could," Johnson said. "Our study shows that, under these lab conditions, consumption of contaminated plants could cause an infection," with implications for wildlife conservation, agriculture, and public health.

The lead author of the previous study, Sandra Pritzkow, PhD, associate professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, said that prions can't replicate, or reproduce, in plants, so plants, like earthworms, should be considered potential carriers rather than hosts."

An article came out yesterday that said the hunters did not get CWD from deer, but had another disease that does affect humans. It was not CWD according to the article. If I can find it I'll post it.

It is BS because they plainly state that consumption of contaminated venison may be the cause when they don't even know if they ate CWD infected venison.
The study on mice and Maccabee monkeys has not had those results replicated by anyone else and hence most in the scientific community do not recognize their results.
And yes we know some folks researching and working on cwd.
Prions have been found in spinal fluid, brain matter, muscle tissue, plants, various carnivores and who knows what else and yet still no transmission to humans.

We have had CWD for what now 20 plus years? It affects game populations yes but human issues certainly don’t seem to be happening. You stand a better chance having the big one dragging out a deer. Wear your mask, get your booster and stay inside because life causes death.

I'll go out on a limb and guess the article said they died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). The medical people who wrote the abstract causing all of this stir are postulating the CJD in these two men may be from CWD crossing the species barrier. If that did or does ever happen, it would not be called CWD in humans.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000204407

Yes, Not the article I read but that is the disease they died from if I remember correctly.

Wear a mask and distance 6ft. the Dr. said so.

Wait til they lengthen the seasons or go into later in the year when the deer are easier to get at to solve their cwd problem in wyoming. They think deer numbers are down now....the main problem up there is their elk population. They are the main carriers, we'll more so than deer....more elk, more cwd....it all got started and will be nation wide in 20 years. Prions cannot be destroyed and live in soil, water, plants. Herbivores will browse and become infected. Just what happens. The article....it would take several years for the hunters to show any sign of cwd. Doesn't happen that fast. Would take a minimum of 3 years. Plus, if you shoot any cervid in a cwd zone, have it tested.

How come we're talking about CWP here? Never even heard of it.

I know lol. I thought it was gonna be about colorado parks and wildlife or some schit....

Yeah, for sure.

Now you don’t believe Fauci is in this CWD stuff?

Or CWP. The scary thing is the pathophysiology of CWD and CJD are near identical.

So, the assumption that a person diagnosed with CJD with a history of consuming CWD meat may have gotten it that way. As rare as CJD is, probably not a bad assumption.

Just need more info.

DF

Good finds las!

I would add prions are proteins with the “wrong” enzyme attached. Last I knew researchers still haven’t figured out how that happens.

Also because prions are not bacteria or viruses, and were discovered decades after the other two, there simply is not as much knowledge out the.

Yeah, those prions are a real curiosity. And being resistant to degradation even with fire sorta puts them in a unique class.

DF

IIRC a few years ago there were a couple of older guys in Wisconsin who contracted CJD concurrently. Their protein diet was comprised primarily of wild game taken in areas afflicted with CWD. But coincidence is not necessarily causation.

Neighbor's wife died of CJD after lingering a year or so in a nursing home. No telling how long she had been infected before she began losing motor control and the diagnosis was not made until autopsy. She was a funeral home administrator and they consumed venison on occasion.

Yeah association vs causation.

For decades they knew there was an association between cigarettes and lung cancer. It took years of data to establish causation.

CJD is so rare, thank goodness, establishing that ingesting CWD meat can cause CJD, or technically a CJD variant, designated vCJD is probably a ways off.

So, agree with testing before eating game from endemic areas.

Scary stuff; pays to be cautious. Don’t get a second chance with that stuff.

DF