| Author | Message | ||
     OUBrew |
The DNR has been shooting deer in selected counties across the state. Just this month they shot 500 deer out of Dane Co. (Madison) and found that 7-8% had CWD. They threw all of the meat away disposing of the bodies in dumpsters. The DNR is scrambling. My father-in-law has a friend that works for the DNR in Dane Co. and he was told that everyhting is up for review...including deer and elk farming. The first thing to go would be feeding/baiting and then deer farming? What is the feel from the farming community? Any concern? | ||
| Anonymous |
first get your facts straight 7-8% get real, she said he said, no comment...... | ||
| Rick |
OUBrew, The 500 deer were shot in Dane and Iowa counties (415 square miles). As of late last week only 13 deer,including the 3 that were found during gun season tested positive. Thats less than 3%. Try and get your facts straight before you post, we don't need anymore false information out there. (Thats 3% to many) Thanks | ||
| OUBrew |
I was only posting the information I received and the number I heard was 7-8%. Obviously, if you know that only 13 deer tested positive...that is more specific info than I had. Regardless, my question remains the same..what effect will this have on deer farming in WI? What effect do you think it will have on the hunting industry in WI? Will you eat the meat? | ||
| Sam James |
Using some statistics and assuming that a good portion of the deer harvested from last fall has been consumed, I am almost certain that many CWD positive deer have already been consumed by the public. If you hunted deer in Dane and Iowa counties, there is probably a 1-2 percent chance any deer you shot was CWD positive. I think with the aid of real statistician and a look back through the history of the disease and the time lag it takes to get back testing results, we can assume it has no affect on humans. Otherwise there would be some history of related illnesses near infected areas. I wouldn't have a problem eating any meat from a healthy looking animal. Just a thought - Sam | ||
| antler333 |
So far, no human has been affected by CWD. However the “absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence”. IN England 10’s of millions of people ate 100’s of millions of pounds of meat before the nvCJD human mutation appeared 10 years later. More nvCJD will appear in Europe and the evidence suggests that eating BSE tainted tissue was the problem. Not all infected BSE animals appeared to be sick either. However, with cervid meat we have perhaps millions of people eating 10’s of millions of pounds of meat. That is at least an order of magnitude less than England’s consumption rate. Further CWD is related to scrapie which has not been linked to humans in 200 years, AND further again, the animal disease incident rate is much less than in England. So the risks here are very, very small. Perhaps a very slight chance that one person may be affected right now is possible. Now, my worry is that since CWD likely jumped from sheep to mule deer and then to elk and to white tails (and DOES kill them all, no exceptions), it has already jumped the species barrier. Once a mutation has jumped species, it seems likely that additional jumps are possible, perhaps more possible than before. So another species jump can be expected eventually. But my guess would be that it will get felines first. | ||
| jason |
antler333, this sheep theory is new to me, could you please post where I could find out more about this. Some posts from "experts" say there is no evidence of crossing from sheep, cattle,swine etc. and vice versa. just curious, so could you please post where I could read more about this theory. Thanks. | ||
| antler333 |
Jason: I will dig out more specific details about CWD links to scrapie from professional papers, but you might like to read this newspaper clipping from last year. But it is a newspaper version.... Rocky Mtn News 11/5/01: '60s study may be wasting disease culprit DOW biologist: Sickness in elk, deer may be result of contact with sheep By Gary Gerhardt, News Staff Writer FORT COLLINS -- A state Division of Wildlife biologist believes a nutritional study he conducted with deer, sheep and goats in the late 1960s might have been the genesis of chronic wasting disease. Gene Schoonveld suspects some of the sheep in his study had scrapie, a relative of chronic wasting disease. Some of the deer might have become infected with scrapie, which then mutated into CWD and spread to other deer. For more than 25 years, scientists have searched without success for the starting point for CWD, which has spread into the wild and in domestic herds of elk on game ranches. The state is in the process of killing more than 1,500 wild deer north and east of Fort Collins and more than 1,000 elk infected with CWD on game ranches throughout the state. Schoonveld admits he doesn't have conclusive proof, but he said if the sheep had scrapie, it might have "jumped" from the sheep and mutated in deer as CWD. The deer and sheep were penned together from 1968 to 1971 during his master's degree project at Colorado State University. Schoonveld was attempting to determine why mule deer didn't digest alfalfa and natural hay supplied during extremely harsh winters. Over the course of study, about three dozen deer died of what later would be identified as classic CWD symptoms. It wasn't until 1977 that CWD was positively identified in the family of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSE, which includes scrapie in sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease in domestic cattle. "I learned after the study that some of the sheep may have had scrapie, and I think they infected deer, which in turn infected wild deer that came around the pens during rutting season, in particular," Schoonveld said. He said that during the study, Colorado State University left sheep in pens where his spare deer were kept. Schoonveld said he was told to use any sheep he wanted as a comparison for the deer in his study. "During that time, two or three dozen of my deer died, and when I sent them to CSU for a necropsy, it always come back that they died of enteritis, an inflammation or infection of the intestinal tract," Schoonveld said. Many of the doe deer came from the wild where they were bred, gave birth, and were turned back into the wild after having been in the pens. "The sheep didn't show evidence of scrapie at the time," Schoonveld said. "I know because I went into pens where I had 40 or 50 deer in reserve and 30 to 40 sheep. I got what I needed from that pen, but it wasn't until later I was told those sheep came from a scrapie project. Since scrapie and CWD is so closely linked, what else could it be?" Schoonveld said after CSU graduate student Beth Williams positively identified chronic wasting disease in deer and elk in 1977, "it became crystal clear it was CWD that had killed my deer." But the exact cause of CWD in deer or how they contract it remained a mystery. "I think Gene's hypothesis is very reasonable. I, too, would lean toward scrapie, but there's nothing to prove it is how this disease first began," said Williams, now a professor at the veterinary science lab at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Williams said she asked around about sheep with scrapie being on the campus in the late 1960s and couldn't find anyone who was aware of any such project. "However, they didn't always diagnose scrapie so I wouldn't rule it out," she added. Wildlife division veterinarian Mike Miller, who has done extensive study on CWD, doubts Schoonveld's theory. "In all the literature we have searched there never has been a mention of scrapie in sheep in those pens during that period. And even if there was, there is nothing to prove CWD is the result of a transfer of scrapie from infected sheep to deer or elk," Miller said. Cleon Kimberling, a professor of clinical sciences at CSU, said he also heard there was scrapie in the pens at the time of Schoonveld's study, but had no proof. Steve Kerr, a work-study student at CSU at the time of the experiment who now is a veterinarian in Torrington, Wyo., said, "I remember at the time there were sheep that had surgeries, but they weren't kept as long as the deer. They could have had scrapie, but we didn't know it." Going back through slides from the pens, Kerr said he doesn't see sick sheep but does see sick deer. "There have been sheep with scrapie on grazing allotments in the wild, but the disease doesn't seem to have spread to deer. The only thing different was the proximity of their being in the pens," he said. That's what led Schoonveld to his conclusion. "I'm guessing it was prolonged nose-to-nose exposure between infected sheep and deer that may have led to the jump," he said. Wild deer would come around the pens during the rut and because it was a single fence, Schoonveld said, they could have come nose to nose with the deer in the pens and may have contracted CWD, which spread into wild herds. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies attack the brain and central nervous system, destroying healthy tissue. The victim loses basic physical and mental abilities as the disease progresses. The word spongiform describes the spongelike condition of brain tissue, which has microscopic holes in it. To date, there is no cure for the fatal disease. Since proteins differ from one species to another -- pathogens proteinaceous infectious particles, or prions -- are far less likely to survive when transferred, or "jumped," from one species to another. This "species barrier" is extremely difficult to breach. If a breach happens, however, scientists say the prion could mutate and be rather easily passed to other members of the same species. "We don't know how it jumps, but we do know it's possible for diseases of one species to cross the barrier to other species," said Gregory Raymond, a scientist with Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Laboratory of Persistent Viral Diseases, in Hamilton, Mt. "Sheep that grazed in an area may have left a disease on the ground that can't be killed by disinfectant, and it could pass on to other species," Raymond said. Extended nose-to-nose contact, or a deer licking the placenta of an infected sheep might be a factor in a disease crossing the species barrier, said Raymond, who added that hasn't been proved. Contact Gary Gerhardt at (303) 892-5202 or gerhardtg@RockyMountainNews.com. | ||
| antler333 |
Jason: Here is the techical mumbo jumbo substanciating the link. This will be kind of heavy duty, word wise, but I think it links CWD to scrapie rather than BSE. To Quote Williams and Young, Vet Pathol V30, P43 & 44 “Neuronal cytoplasmic vacuolation is common in CWD and is a hallmark of sheep scrapie. Astrocytic hypertrophy and hyperplasia are typical of scrapie, transmissible mink encephalopathy, natural and experimental kuru, and CreutzfeldtJakob disease and are demonstrated in CWD by Cajal's method and immunoreactivity to glial fibrillary acidic protein and by electron microscopy.... In scrapie of sheep and goats, significant degenerative changes occur in thalamus, mesencephalon, pons, medulla, and cerebellum, with relatively mild involvement of more rostral regions of the brain, including basal nuclei and cerebral cortex. These distributions are similar to that observed in cervids with CWD. Severe involvement of olfactory tubercle and cortex is seen in deer and elk with CWD; however, this is not described in bovine spongiform encephalopathy and is not common in either sheep or goats with scrapie, although moderate lesions have been reported in these regions. Significant thalamic involvement was a prominent feature of scrapie in goats, and degenerative changes in supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, similar to lesions seen in CWD, have been described in sheep and goat scrapie. Involvement of many of the nuclei in midbrain, pons, and medulla is similar in scrapie and CWD, including the prominent degenerative lesions that have been observed in the parasympathetic vagal nucleus in sheep but not in experimentally infected goats...." | ||
| Eric |
How about we dont tell anyone anything if it is not a fact! So thing dont get misunderstood.... could be , might be what if , I dont know my dad dont know and he is on the DNR and you dont know lets wait and hope things work out in the end and , God Bless | ||
| NYBill |
Theres a gal looking into those prions in california, lets keep our fingers crossed! | ||
| davevan |
Now that the DATCP has issued their proposed rule for any deer farming in WI. (I am a deer farmer, specifically Fallow), and am wondering if deer farmers are going to get some type of monetary relief from the state for all of the expense and restrictions they are imposing. Cuurently in WI. all other types of farms are given dollars to cover extra expenses and hardships. I feel it is only fair that our industry have a little help also. As most farmers know, there is not a lot of profit currently in the venison production market. If Bird farmers and sheep farmers get relief why can't our industry? I hope some of the WI politicians are reading items on this site as this is an opportunity for them to gain much support. Thanks. | ||
| Independence Ranch (Roger_P) |
Its election time soon. Speak directly to them. NOW is when they will listen to anyone. |
