Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Our Whitetail Heritage
Deer Hunters will enjoy getting acquainted with Rob Wegner's contributions on his new website "Our Whitetail Heritage" www.UplandsDeer.org/heritage
In the site Rob will offer periodic articles on the Deer Hunting tradition and an introduction to several books he has either authored or in the case of several classics books he has brought back into print and updated with an editorial forward.
In the site Rob will offer periodic articles on the Deer Hunting tradition and an introduction to several books he has either authored or in the case of several classics books he has brought back into print and updated with an editorial forward.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Wisconsin CWD Update - April 25, 2005
Things have been pretty quiet in Wisconsin on CWD front.
The DNR has been working on trying to get the Genie back in the bottle while not embarassing themselves in the process.
They've finally figured out that depicting CWD as a highly contagious, rapidly spreading, fatal and almost unstoppable disease with the potential to wipe out the entire deer herd in the state created massive problems for them. - beginning with the subsequent discovery that it was NOT confined to a small manageable area of infection near Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin - but found extensively across Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois.
The insurgents (infected deer) have turned out to be much more widespread and inhabit such a large territory that it is impossible to wipe them out by herd eradication - which was the only treatment method the DNR would consider as viable.
Making matters more difficult were the financial realities of shrinking budgets, sagging economy, and the fact that insufficient numbers of hunters could be energized to slaughter deer at a rate to bring population levels down to levels needed by the doctrine they adopted.
They have also discovered a reality - first observed in Colorado - that the more you test for CWD the more you discover how widespread it has been. Thus testing outside of the previously established zone of known CWD is a double edged sword. If tests outside the zone come up negative then it helps with PR in that they can say they have confined the disease. But as has been the case, tests outside of the zone also discover new cases - which obligate (under the previous policy) the DNR to expand the War Zone and thus make the task of herd and disease eradication that much more challenging.
So the genius solution to the above Gordian Knot - with a distinctive Orwellian twist - is to declare new cases as "isolated" temporary migrants from the original zone rather than a sample of a larger population of infected animals in the new region. Thus the CWD zone no longer automatically expands when new cases are found. Creative GovSpeak reduces them to an asterick to be watched in the future.
Another development in the larger CWD arena that has relevance to Wisconsin is recent research on a new testing regime called Conformation-Dependent Immunoassay (CDI) by a team of blue chip researchers that includes Stanley B. Prusiner - one of the pioneers in discovering and identifying this class of Deformed Prion Protein diseases. This research has - among other findings - cast doubt on the efficacy of the Immunohistochemistry (IHC) procedure as the "Gold Standard" of detecting prion disease. This team of researchers maintains that IHC too often fails to detect positive cases - thus declaring false negatives. They maintain that the CDI ought to replace the IHC as a much more accurate procedure.
How the above relates to Wisconsin is that our Wisconsin lab has been invalidating positive initial CWD screening tests using ELIZA immunoassay's when they are not subsequently confirmed by the IHC process. Hundreds of cases of initial screens of positive CWD have been thrown out as false using this procedure. Prusiner's recent published research casts serious doubt on the integrity of this policy. The bottom line. Some Wisconsin hunters consumed venison that the DNR reported to them as "CWD safe" when they were suspect and the geographic range of known CWD is much more extensive than the conservative reporting by the DNR indicates.
Now I'd like to underscore a point and not mimic the Chicken Little mantra initially followed by the DNR. Even though CWD is much more extensively found in Wisconsin than initially thought: 1) It affects only a small minority of the deer, 2) A Positive CWD report usually is only a precursor to the clinical disease (a parallel might be that a positive HIV can signal that AIDS may follow. . . but some, like Magic Johnson, do not progress to AIDS itself), 3) There has been no documented case - world wide - of anyone getting seriously ill from consuming CWD infected venison, 4) According to what is known about where in the body CWD prions are found, a properly dressed out deer that happened to have CWD would have essentially zero chance to including a CWD prion within the venison saved for consumption, and 5) Contrary to Chicken Little pronouncements - by those with other interests to promote - CWD spreads at a glacial pace and has no record of wiping out or massively infecting even a tiny region of wild deer population.
Bottom Line: CWD should not be ignored; it is an element to be considered in the management of deer and in advising deer hunters. But folks the wolf is not at the door; the sky is not falling. There is time for an intelligent, informed, and scientifically current response to the situation.
Actually a much more relevant and important use of the money that has been poured into CWD abatement is research like Prusiner's - whose primary focus is on the only known prion disease to affect humans - Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD has killed humans; CWD has not. And while CJD is a very rare disease, research in this area may uncover clues to a much more prevalent human disease - Alsheimers.
Even the Wisconsin, DNR has bigger fish under their responsibilities for Deer and Deer Hunting than futzing around with trying to eradicate CWD. In at least one third of the state, the deer population is out of control - causing millions of dollars of loss due to crop damage, forest degradation, deer-vehicle damage, and loss of life due to deer collisions. Additionally across the entire state, the sport of deer hunting is declining - removing our major tool for keeping the deer herd in check. For the past four years the agency has had its eye on the hole instead of the donut. Perhaps this will change.
--Ross
The DNR has been working on trying to get the Genie back in the bottle while not embarassing themselves in the process.
They've finally figured out that depicting CWD as a highly contagious, rapidly spreading, fatal and almost unstoppable disease with the potential to wipe out the entire deer herd in the state created massive problems for them. - beginning with the subsequent discovery that it was NOT confined to a small manageable area of infection near Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin - but found extensively across Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois.
The insurgents (infected deer) have turned out to be much more widespread and inhabit such a large territory that it is impossible to wipe them out by herd eradication - which was the only treatment method the DNR would consider as viable.
Making matters more difficult were the financial realities of shrinking budgets, sagging economy, and the fact that insufficient numbers of hunters could be energized to slaughter deer at a rate to bring population levels down to levels needed by the doctrine they adopted.
They have also discovered a reality - first observed in Colorado - that the more you test for CWD the more you discover how widespread it has been. Thus testing outside of the previously established zone of known CWD is a double edged sword. If tests outside the zone come up negative then it helps with PR in that they can say they have confined the disease. But as has been the case, tests outside of the zone also discover new cases - which obligate (under the previous policy) the DNR to expand the War Zone and thus make the task of herd and disease eradication that much more challenging.
So the genius solution to the above Gordian Knot - with a distinctive Orwellian twist - is to declare new cases as "isolated" temporary migrants from the original zone rather than a sample of a larger population of infected animals in the new region. Thus the CWD zone no longer automatically expands when new cases are found. Creative GovSpeak reduces them to an asterick to be watched in the future.
Another development in the larger CWD arena that has relevance to Wisconsin is recent research on a new testing regime called Conformation-Dependent Immunoassay (CDI) by a team of blue chip researchers that includes Stanley B. Prusiner - one of the pioneers in discovering and identifying this class of Deformed Prion Protein diseases. This research has - among other findings - cast doubt on the efficacy of the Immunohistochemistry (IHC) procedure as the "Gold Standard" of detecting prion disease. This team of researchers maintains that IHC too often fails to detect positive cases - thus declaring false negatives. They maintain that the CDI ought to replace the IHC as a much more accurate procedure.
How the above relates to Wisconsin is that our Wisconsin lab has been invalidating positive initial CWD screening tests using ELIZA immunoassay's when they are not subsequently confirmed by the IHC process. Hundreds of cases of initial screens of positive CWD have been thrown out as false using this procedure. Prusiner's recent published research casts serious doubt on the integrity of this policy. The bottom line. Some Wisconsin hunters consumed venison that the DNR reported to them as "CWD safe" when they were suspect and the geographic range of known CWD is much more extensive than the conservative reporting by the DNR indicates.
Now I'd like to underscore a point and not mimic the Chicken Little mantra initially followed by the DNR. Even though CWD is much more extensively found in Wisconsin than initially thought: 1) It affects only a small minority of the deer, 2) A Positive CWD report usually is only a precursor to the clinical disease (a parallel might be that a positive HIV can signal that AIDS may follow. . . but some, like Magic Johnson, do not progress to AIDS itself), 3) There has been no documented case - world wide - of anyone getting seriously ill from consuming CWD infected venison, 4) According to what is known about where in the body CWD prions are found, a properly dressed out deer that happened to have CWD would have essentially zero chance to including a CWD prion within the venison saved for consumption, and 5) Contrary to Chicken Little pronouncements - by those with other interests to promote - CWD spreads at a glacial pace and has no record of wiping out or massively infecting even a tiny region of wild deer population.
Bottom Line: CWD should not be ignored; it is an element to be considered in the management of deer and in advising deer hunters. But folks the wolf is not at the door; the sky is not falling. There is time for an intelligent, informed, and scientifically current response to the situation.
Actually a much more relevant and important use of the money that has been poured into CWD abatement is research like Prusiner's - whose primary focus is on the only known prion disease to affect humans - Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD has killed humans; CWD has not. And while CJD is a very rare disease, research in this area may uncover clues to a much more prevalent human disease - Alsheimers.
Even the Wisconsin, DNR has bigger fish under their responsibilities for Deer and Deer Hunting than futzing around with trying to eradicate CWD. In at least one third of the state, the deer population is out of control - causing millions of dollars of loss due to crop damage, forest degradation, deer-vehicle damage, and loss of life due to deer collisions. Additionally across the entire state, the sport of deer hunting is declining - removing our major tool for keeping the deer herd in check. For the past four years the agency has had its eye on the hole instead of the donut. Perhaps this will change.
--Ross
