Saturday, January 28, 2006
CWD in Muscle Meat & Other News
Just posted an article on the CWD Watch Website on this article in Science Journal about finding CWD Prions in the muscle meat of severely diseased Mule Deer. See our complete analysis at http://www.Caids-wi.org/science-journal.html
It was interesting to see that the Wisconsin State DNR may finally be understanding that inflaming the public with unfounded threats vis-a-vis CWD just isn't a good idea. For a change no alarmist rhetoric coming from the department. In addition, the state department officially charged with being stewards of public health were quite clear about the limited insight from this study. The Channel 15 News website reported the comments of department spokesperson Stephanie Marquis: "At this point there's nothing new to do with the public health risk with this . . . . We want to error on the side of caution and still have people get their meat tested but we still haven't seen CWD in humans and so we don't want this research to be alarmist unnecessarily."
But the WMTV reporter did manage to attribute an alarmist statement to University of Wisconsin Prion Disease Researcher Judd Aiken: " he says you shouldn't eat any deer shot in the eradication zone." If indeed this attribution is accurate, perhaps Aiken is the first person to ever show signs of cognitive impairment from contact with CWD prions. He has after all a long history of dealing with these so-called infectious agents in numerous variations of their form - bovine, mink, sheep, and deer. In fact Aiken's Department is fingered by some as the possible Garden of Eden for the introduction of CWD into the Deer Herd. In the 1990s, they were Midwest pioneers in exploring various forms of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy and had research subjects at the Ag Research Facility west of Madison - less than 15 miles from the core of the disease zone. How that infected material and infected animals were disposed of is an intriguing question that University has never been able to answer.
In any case, one wonders how in the world the deer population is going to be controlled if no one should eat venison from the eradication zone - which now covers 11 counties in Wisconsin and several counties in Northern Illinois?
Since one cannot prove a negative, no scientist can say with certainty that one could not catch a fatal disease from eating venison. The best evidence we have is that to date there has been no record of a single death or any evidence of human contamination.
Furthermore, in looking at any other meat product, a scientist must also allow that a fatal condition could indeed result from consuming beef, pork, turkey or chicken. And in this case, there are some actual examples of deaths. Wonder if researcher Aiken has ever heard of E-Coli? Perhaps the prudent behavior is to avoid all forms of meat and poultry for there is established risk in consuming all of them? In fact I think I've heard of E-Coli contamination of vegetables (this happens through the water used to rinse the vegetables prior to shipment) so we better take them off our diet too.
As we said in our web page report on this subject, the most worthwhile point to come out of this new info on CWD is to insist that the Wisconsin DNR change their CWD testing program to emphasize food safety, full disclosure of test results, and rapid reporting of results to hunters and venison consumers.
After four years of failure, it is clear we cannot shoot our way into eradication of the disease and eradication of all potentially infected deer. Lets turn to a common sense approach to providing hunters the best available testing program and support research that will identify the cause of the disease as well as tools for combating it.
It was interesting to see that the Wisconsin State DNR may finally be understanding that inflaming the public with unfounded threats vis-a-vis CWD just isn't a good idea. For a change no alarmist rhetoric coming from the department. In addition, the state department officially charged with being stewards of public health were quite clear about the limited insight from this study. The Channel 15 News website reported the comments of department spokesperson Stephanie Marquis: "At this point there's nothing new to do with the public health risk with this . . . . We want to error on the side of caution and still have people get their meat tested but we still haven't seen CWD in humans and so we don't want this research to be alarmist unnecessarily."
But the WMTV reporter did manage to attribute an alarmist statement to University of Wisconsin Prion Disease Researcher Judd Aiken: " he says you shouldn't eat any deer shot in the eradication zone." If indeed this attribution is accurate, perhaps Aiken is the first person to ever show signs of cognitive impairment from contact with CWD prions. He has after all a long history of dealing with these so-called infectious agents in numerous variations of their form - bovine, mink, sheep, and deer. In fact Aiken's Department is fingered by some as the possible Garden of Eden for the introduction of CWD into the Deer Herd. In the 1990s, they were Midwest pioneers in exploring various forms of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy and had research subjects at the Ag Research Facility west of Madison - less than 15 miles from the core of the disease zone. How that infected material and infected animals were disposed of is an intriguing question that University has never been able to answer.
In any case, one wonders how in the world the deer population is going to be controlled if no one should eat venison from the eradication zone - which now covers 11 counties in Wisconsin and several counties in Northern Illinois?
Since one cannot prove a negative, no scientist can say with certainty that one could not catch a fatal disease from eating venison. The best evidence we have is that to date there has been no record of a single death or any evidence of human contamination.
Furthermore, in looking at any other meat product, a scientist must also allow that a fatal condition could indeed result from consuming beef, pork, turkey or chicken. And in this case, there are some actual examples of deaths. Wonder if researcher Aiken has ever heard of E-Coli? Perhaps the prudent behavior is to avoid all forms of meat and poultry for there is established risk in consuming all of them? In fact I think I've heard of E-Coli contamination of vegetables (this happens through the water used to rinse the vegetables prior to shipment) so we better take them off our diet too.
As we said in our web page report on this subject, the most worthwhile point to come out of this new info on CWD is to insist that the Wisconsin DNR change their CWD testing program to emphasize food safety, full disclosure of test results, and rapid reporting of results to hunters and venison consumers.
After four years of failure, it is clear we cannot shoot our way into eradication of the disease and eradication of all potentially infected deer. Lets turn to a common sense approach to providing hunters the best available testing program and support research that will identify the cause of the disease as well as tools for combating it.
