I
had a sad conversation only a few days ago with a lady from Camdenton who told
me that several years ago her husband died from Kruetzfeldt-Jakobs disease. Her
name was Carol Schroeder. Her husband’s death was due to the same horrible
disease that biologists call ‘Chronic Wasting Disease’ in deer and elk. It has
also been called mad deer disease, or mad cow disease when it occurs in cattle.
You
have not heard the Missouri Department of Conservation talk about whether or
not the disease can spread from deer to humans, but it is known that it does,
whether it comes from deer or cattle. For some reason, the news media has
helped the MDC keep people very uninformed about this disease. But there
is much that you need to know if you hunt deer and eat deer.
First of all, NEVER eat Venison that someone
else has killed and butchered, and though it was an accepted thing to do for
years past, DO NOT EAT DEER MEAT THAT COMES FROM THE SHARE YOUR HARVEST PROGRAM
which the MDC has carried forth for years and years. You cannot be sure there
are no prions in that meat you receive.
It
is believed that prions, which are the diseases infective agents in deer, elk,
goats, and cattle is not found in blood or meat, but rather in the brain and
spinal fluid of the animal. It might possibly be found in bone marrow,
but that is something they aren’t sure about. It might well be that you
could eat the meat from a CWD animal without getting the disease, but if that
animal has been shot in the spine or brain, prions may be found throughout the
body of the animal.
If
the spinal column is cut as part of the butchering who knows where prions may
be in the meat. The MDC knows that. This year all deer killed in a
selected twenty-five county area in the state MUST BE checked at a designated check
station for CWD… the animal term for the Kruetzfeldt-Jakobs malady in man.
I believe if deer hunting is to continue in states with a good percentage
of CWD deer, that testing has to be part of it. I don’t think I ever want to
eat another deer if it hasn’t been tested. Maybe if I hadn’t talked to so
many people in this state who have lost loved ones to that disease, I wouldn’t
be so nervous about killing a deer and butchering it, putting the meat in my freezer
that will be eaten by several others than just me.
But
in a dozen or so cases I have been contacted about, all were men and all were
deer hunters. Relatives talked of the horrible consequences they witnessed
in the death of their loved ones. In each case, the Center for Disease Control
out of Atlanta has required the victims to be immediately cremated, no
embalming or funeral allowed.
The
lady I talked with told me that her husband had died in a St.Louis hospital in
a quarantined room and that his body was taken to the crematory by police
escort to be sure that if any accident occurred on the way his body would not be
handled by unknowing first responders.
“I
never believed in assisted suicide,” she told me, but I would have given
anything if it could have happened for my poor husband. It took him two
months to die and what he went through, what I saw as his brain deteriorated, I
cannot even talk about it to this day.” So because of what I have learned
I would recommend that no one in the future take deer meat they know nothing
about, and that would end the economic viability of deer processing plants and
those who make deer sausage and jerky often for gifts or sale.
I
don’t like that, because the great percentage of those people are fine folks
and have nothing to do with what created this disease. Of course those
who handle deer meat on that kind of scale use rubber gloves, but no one can be
absolutely sure that they won’t be in contact with prions when you are dealing
with dozens of deer. That’s because no one seems to know exactly what those
‘prions’ are . They are some kind of strange protein, not a virus or bacteria.
I have asked my daughter, a doctor, to tell me more about it, but even
though she saw a patient with disease in medical school, she hesitates to say
much about the disease, or the prions, because doctors really aren’t sure what
to say about, and how to adequately inform the public about it.
If
you research it, you will learn that it is pretty much known that Kruetzfeldt -Jakobs
disease was first diagnosed in England, sometime in the seventies and eighties
of the last century. The cattle industry in that country was giving
cattle all kinds of medicines and hormones to put more weight on steers and
produce more milk in dairy cattle. The beef producers got the great idea
that man could go against the way God had created things to make more money.
He had created herbivores and carnivores and omnivores on this earth, if
you really do believe in a Creator. Herbivores are plant eaters, carnivores
are meat eaters and omnivores are those creatures which eat both plants and
meat.
Omnivores
include man but not deer or cattle. But the industry started feeding cattle
meat by-products and bone meal mixed into the feed in feedlots. That is how the mad-cow disease began,
as a result of greedy men wanting to make beef cattle heavier and dairy cattle
bigger to produce more milk. In
deer it started with that same kind of greed. Mix in meat and bone meal to feed elk and deer and it would
make them bigger, with bigger antlers.
In North Missouri, an Amish man who wanted to raise and sell big bucks
in pens, bought several CWD infected deer from a deer breeder in Ohio and it
has been reported, but not verified, that as hundreds of people started to
raise deer in pens, they were worried that a unhealthy looking deer might
infect others, so they released them into the wild.
The
first cases of wild deer dying from the disease took place just a little ways
from a penned-deer operation in North Missouri. Those operations are now found all over Missouri, and I am
not sure if all of them, or even the greater percentage of them, have had their
stock tested. It is a big time moneymaker
for those who raise deer, because the bucks they raise are put in enclosures
where they can be hunted by very wealthy trophy seekers.
I
was told by a man who worked at such a place that he helped inject bucks with
two chemicals so they could be moved from pens where they were raised, to a pen
where they could be shot. He said the
chemical given to the buck had warnings on the boxes to not inject the chemical
into any animal that would be eaten. He said that those deer were all processed
and given to the MDC to go into the “Share Your Harvest” program. He said it is likely that many poor
families ate meat that was chemically tainted by those dangerous injections and
never knew it. Another reason that
this state should immediately stop that practice of giving deer meat away to
poorer families. People are dying
from eating CWD deer meat. The MDC
no doubt knows there is a risk but if you look at their announcements and their
concerns over the disease, they never ever acknowledge that it might be a risk
for hunters and their families who eat venison.
In
fact, I doubt if there are any records to be found about the number of people
in this state or any others who have died from Kruetzfeldt-Jakobs disease. Why
not? Don’t you think there are
accurate numbers on deaths from other diseases? CWD is a threat to Conservation Departments because they
will lose great amounts of money if deer hunters stop buying deer tags. If non-resident hunters quit coming
here, it will harm the state’s economy.
If
you want to realize how deep all this might go, you should realize that this
article cannot be used in a large number of Missouri Newspapers… not even as a
letter to the editor. As far as
this problem may extend into today’s deer numbers in this state or how much of
a problem it may become, you are never going to know what the whole truth
is. But the people of this state
needs to hear from Mrs. Schroeder and others who have witnessed the disease,
people like Bill Zippro from Joplin who lost his brother to the disease the
year after his brother killed a big buck that didn’t seem to be wild.
But
none of that is going to happen.
So I pass on the one thing that seems to be a way for hunters to be a
little safer. Don’t even touch a
sick or dying deer, and do not clean a deer shot in the spinal column or
brain. Don’t cut through any bone,
cut the meat off the carcass without causing any cuts or damage to the spinal
column. In that way, even if the
prions are there, you are not likely to contact them or release them into the
meat. The day has to come, and
soon, that all deer killed in this state are immediately tested, so the meat
can be utilized by a hunter and his family, safely.
And
I would recommend that everyone who hunts read the article in one of my past
magazines written by a Texas doctor about deer and CWD. To get a copy of it call my office…417-777-5227.
