BILL ZIPPRO

     Bill Zippro, a resident of Joplin, Mo will tell you that his brother died a young man with prions in his brain because he killed and ate a huge buck which was not acting right. His brother told him the buck didn’t make any attempt to escape and he told Bill he thought the deer had been turned loose from a nearby deer farm where they feed deer meat and bone by-products to make bigger antlers. 

      He said his brother was shown to have the prions in his brain and spinal fluid, and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia verified it. In humans it is called ‘Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs’ disease and in deer and elk it is called ‘chronic wasting’ disease.  They call it ‘mad–cow’ disease in cattle, ‘scrapies’ in sheep.  All these are transmissible spongiform disease… all of them should be called that and nothing else regardless of what strain they identify the prions as.  Prions are prions!  All those diseases involve prions which create holes in the brain. 

     When he died, Zippro’s brother’s family was refused a normal funeral, because his body had to be cremated quickly. Bill Zippro took the frozen deer head all the way to Atlanta to the Center for Disease Control and they would not test it, refusing to let him bring it in.  I met in person with Zippro, still emotionally torn up by watching the horror of his brother dying over several weeks with the horrible disease. He told me what he saw with tears in his eyes. I have talked to many family members of men who died of prions to the brain. I wish you could hear what he says but no news agency will talk to him.  WHY? 

     The only thing you will ever see on this subject will have to go through the Conservation Department which tells the state’s deer hunters that human’s cannot get the disease.  That has proven to be false; horrible misinformation used to keep deer hunter numbers high and revenue from deer tags growing.  The variety of names makes most Missourians believe it.   All the diseases are a result of something called prions and they are still a puzzlement to most medical people.  My daughter, who is a doctor, confirms that if she saw a patient with the early onset of the disease it would be very hard to diagnose. She tells me that in her early years as a doctor, she saw a case of it at the University of Missouri hospital in Columbia.  That was about 25 years ago. Other doctors say the same thing.  It can be confused with other diseases without a brain biopsy.  

     There was a test done years ago on about 300 people who died of what was presumed to be Alzheimers disease.  They created slides from brain tissue of those people and 34 of them had prions in the brain.  Those 34 had died of TSE.  Zippro thinks the huge deer his brother killed had been kept in captivity. Remember this… The disease is called TSE and if you kill a deer with what the MDC  wants to call something else… it is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy and there isn’t one person who swears a human cannot get the disease from a deer who will eat a loin steak from a deer that has TSE or CWD or whatever name they want to give it.  It is PRION-IN-BRAIN disease and it has killed hundreds and hundreds of people, including two scientists in Italy who were trying to study. Look it up on the internet… it describes transmissible spongiform encephalopathy as “a disease which affects both mammals and humans.   It is always fatal.” 

 

 

The Missouri Department of Conservation fears that if the truth is known about the ‘chronic wasting disease it will cost them a lot of money. 

They were geared up to start selling non-resident tags for hundreds of dollars to the wealthier out-of-state hunters looking for trophies.  That ‘seven-point or greater’ rule put into affect in two thirds of Missouri only a few years ago was to serve that purpose… create more “trophies”.  Biologically and enforcement wise it is a ridiculous concept.  Some of the older agents told me that confidentially they wouldn’t even attempt to enforce it because of the silliness of it.

     But hunters looking for trophies do not worry about chronic wasting disease, they don’t intend to eat the deer, they want a cape and a set of antlers, and that is it.  From that concept the Conservation Commission did well in setting up a ‘share the harvest’ program which turned over venison the trophy hunters didn’t want to poor families who could use the meat.  With mad-deer disease spreading, that program should someday be stopped.  No one should take a chance on eating the meat of a sick deer harvested perhaps in some other part of the state just for its antlers.

     My oldest daughter is a doctor and I question her about the chronic wasting disease and have a hard time getting her to give me hard medical answers.  She says it a disease spread by organisms called prions, and there isn’t she can say that the medical profession is absolutely sure of.  To a doctor, mad-deer disease or mad-cow disease is known as ‘Creutzfeldt-Jakob’ disease.  My daughter has told me that anyone eating venison from a diseased deer is at risk and should never do it.  Prions aren’t bacteria and they are not virus.  There really isn’t a good definition of exactly what they are!  Prions seem to exist in the brain and spinal fluid and possibly bone marrow, but not in blood.

      What they call Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, (nothing more than prion-in-the-brain disease or TSE) was created by feeding meat and bone meal to cattle in England in order to make them heavier and worth more money. The same thing created it in deer and elk in the United States years and years ago, feeding a commercial food with meat and bone meal to herbivores in order to create bigger antlers.