Good News

From: Board Moderator
To: HuntersHeritage
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 6:13 AM
Subject: [HuntersHeritage] Deer disease ruled out in deaths of two Wisconsin hunters

Deer disease ruled out in deaths of two Wisconsin hunters
Reuters News Service
November 22, 2002

MADISON, Wis., Nov 21 (Reuters) - Wisconsin health authorities ruled out on Thursday a category of rare brain diseases in the deaths of two of three outdoorsmen who shared meals of wild game in the 1970s through the 1990s.

An investigation of brain tissue from two of the men, Wisconsin residents Wayne Waterhouse and Roger Marten, found no evidence of prions, the misshapen proteins that cause a host of fatal brain illnesses, including "mad cow" disease in cattle, chronic wasting disease in deer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, officials said.

The investigation confirmed that the third man, James Botts of Minnesota, did die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob occurs spontaneously at a rate of about one case per 1 million people, while a related illness known as new variant CJD has been linked in Europe to eating meat from cattle infected with mad cow disease.

"Thanks to a new testing process not available at the time of the initial diagnosis of CJD in these patients, we are able to demonstrate the absence of prions in the brain tissues of two of the patients," Dr. Jeffrey Davis, Wisconsin's state epidemiologist, said in a statement.

"Therefore, these three cases cannot be attributed to a common source of illness," Davis said.

The Wisconsin Division of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the investigation last summer to determine whether there was any link between the deaths of the men, who took part in a series of wild game feasts, and chronic wasting disease, which was discovered in Wisconsin's wild deer herd earlier this year.

The tissues were examined by pathologists at the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Unlike mad cow, chronic wasting disease has never been shown to "jump species" and infect humans or livestock. However, the World Health Organization has advised against eating venison or any part of an animal that appears sick.

The statement said it is still impossible to say with absolute certainty that the chronic wasting disease prion in deer will never cause human illness.

Nice post. The media jumped on the band wagon talking about the relationship of these men and wild game and the CWD. I didn't hear this article that two men were cleared, just one of them. I read an article about CWD and it had a good point. If it jumps to humans (again not proven) you still have a better chance of dying driving to go hunting, falling out of your stand, or having a heart attack pulling the big one out.

Hcliff