Two hunters from the same lodge afflicted with sporadic CJD: is CWD to blame?
neurology.org
neurology.org
And the authorities have become very reluctant to do testing due to the expense -- I've got meat from multiple untested animals in the freezer.
Not sure that this was meant and if that even makes sense.
Animals don't have medicine, so the sick or diseased amongst them can spread susceptibility to illness more readily, over time making groups more genetically or immunologically prone in a way that could lead to destabilization, become vectors for contamination (some cancers are contagious, like in dogs, and prions don't break down easily, making them true ecohazards), or end up as vectors as they contact other animal populations (HIV and swine flu were non-human origin).
Predators also encourage migration of herds, so deer won't consume an environment to depletion, including crops.
Predation is nature's free labor!
If deer to human transmission is truly possible, then I would be worried about the possibilities here.
The bow will make about as much noise.
Regarding the cartridge, while I generally prefer high velocity projectiles for whitetails without the silencer, when hunting suppressed I'm on board with subsonic, but IMO the best cartridge for that is big-bore (I personally use .44 magnum, bolt action like you suggest, 300 grain hollow-point at around 1050 fps). At that low velocity, you don't get much hydrostatic shockwave, so might as well make the biggest hole possible for an ethical kill. That lumbering freight train won't stop for anything, smashes right through bones. But even subsonic, it's a lot louder than a bow -- movie pew-pew just won't consistently put down something as big as a whitetail. Also note that at those low velocities, it's difficult to get bullets to consistently expand, so I do lots of terminal ballistics testing to find the optimal projectile and load.
For grandparent comment, too bad you have those hunting restrictions -- where I hunt, while this year's regs aren't out yet, for the last couple of years, anyone who wants to can shoot 12 deer per year (of which at most 2 can be bucks). They're trying to put a dent in the population, for various reasons including CWD, although I frankly think it's excessive.
[1]: https://www.silencershop.com/blog/post/suppressor-laws-by-st...
I seriously think a bow twang is louder
Somebody on the neighborhood listserv has advertised candle-light vigils for the deer at an adjoining field, but I haven't seen that in a few years.
We've been told recently of deer infected with CWD found near my grandparents farm (where I hunt). So I don't see myself going out much at all anymore, never was a trophy hunter, I do really like the taste of venison.
He was a lifelong deer hunter, lived in the woods for a few weeks every year, field dressing, butchering, and eating his kills the traditional way. Our area has CWD cases, and while he was going through it, I asked if he'd ever tested or been tested, and he said no, he'd been told it wasn't contagious to humans.
Of course, authors are supposed to given the long form and abbreviated form in parentheses. The trouble is in printed journals it can be difficult to find the first use of the abbreviation. Fortunately viewing articles in an electronic medium it's usually possible to do a search which is a real time-saver.
Furthermore, an abbreviation can have multiple meanings, especially across disciplines. For example, PSA can stand for prostate specific antigen, pressure-sensitive adhesive, public service announcement and probably some others too. Anyway I try to be mindful of the ambiguity abbreviations can produce. By all means, spelling out the term(s) abbreviations refer to should be considered mandatory.
> To date, there have been no reported cases of CWD infection in people. However, some animal studies suggest CWD poses a risk to certain types of non-human primates, like monkeys, that eat meat from CWD-infected animals or come in contact with brain or body fluids from infected deer or elk. These studies raise concerns that there may also be a risk to people. Since 1997, the World Health Organization has recommended that it is important to keep the agents of all known prion diseases from entering the human food chain.
But also consider that millions of deer are hunted and consumed in the US every year, and that hunters don't seem to be developing prion diseases at an elevated rate. We know relatively little about prions, but it seems likely that humans are fairly resilient to this, perhaps except for some predisposed individuals. Genetic factors are suspected, but there's no smoking gun. Acquired vCJD is exceedingly rare too.
A larger-than-expected percentage of people Dxed with CJD are elderly (mid-70s to mid-80s) women which leads me to wonder if medical equipment was used when delivering babies exposed many women? I wonder if their children (who were being delivered) were also infected? In deer the mother-offspring infection route's quite well studied, but I'm not well informed about the human offspring route.
--- Full paper here (not free): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...
The article in JAMA, above, has been summarized on this page: https://www.neurologyadvisor.com/topics/neurodegenerative-di... I'll paste the summary text below:
The incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) has risen considerably from 2007 to 2020, particularly among older women, according to a research letter published in JAMA Neurology.
The progressive, universally fatal prion disease CJD has been stable in the United States (US) between 1979 to 2006. The most common subtype of CJD, sporadic CJD, tends to affect older individuals. As the global population ages, the epidemiology of CJD may be evolving.
To evaluate recent trends in CJD in the US, the researchers sourced data for this cross-sectional study from the Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research multiple cause of death database. Death certificates between 2007 and 2020 for CJD were assessed for volume and decedent demographics.
The incidence of CJD increased consistently between 2007 and 2020, in which there were 5882 total cases and 51.2% occurred among women.
[article continues on the Neurology Advisor page]
In PA, CWD has been detected in a lot of areas (https://pagame.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/b3c0fd44cc594...) but the prevalence seems low: The dashboard is showing 102,933 CWD samples with 1857 cases of CWD detected. (It's not clear how representative this is, or how the samples were acquired.)
Chronic wasting disease sounds ominous. Is it difficult to tell if a deer is infected or is this a mistake any hunter could make?
https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/deadly-brain-amoeba-infec...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/21/brain-ea...
On the first wipeout, my face smashed into the water, and it went very far up my nose.
On getting up, I remembered "Naegleria fowleri", and wondered, hmmmm this might have killed me.
Luckily no symptoms appeared over the next few days.
I feel like wakeboarding should be banned in warm freshwaters.
> The risk of Naegleria fowleri infection is very low. There were 29 reported infections in the United States in the 10 years from 2013 to 2022, despite millions of recreational water exposures each year. By comparison, in the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, there were an estimated 4,012 unintentional drowning deaths each year in the United States.
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/general.html
You’re 150x more likely to drown. And even that is exceedingly unlikely - like 0.05% or something per year.
But of all those listed, cancer is far and away the most common and thus most likely to kill you in practice.
Not a biologist, but if I got that correctly, every time your body replicates your DNA a bit of the end is cut of. There is a section of "garbage" at the end, but once that is gone the "functional" parts of the DNA are cut of.
Once that happens you are guaranteed to develop tumors sooner or later.
It prevents cells from multiplying uncontrollably (and accumulating mutations in the process) by shortening the fuse at each generation.
There's a hierarchy with stem cells at the top that live long, rarely divide, and have few mutations, and the children of the children ... of their children at the bottom divide often, but have a short fuse and a limited lifetime, so they don't keep accumulating mutations as much
It's only a matter of time before nature invents a virus that will work around our defenses and spread silently and then wham, 90% of humanity is gone.
I think we’d manage. Already HIV and AIDS are highly treatable, and lifespans are measured in years and decades rather than days and weeks.
Doesn't it cost something like $100k/yr? And if so do insurance companies keep people on their policy for long after they contract it?
In a lot of countries, access to healthcare is not dependent on the wealth of the recipient, or the goodwill of an insurance company.
With the right motivation, a lot could be accomplished in that time.
AIDS started being noticed in 1981 when a lot of gay men started falling ill and dying. It took until 1983 before scientists figured out it was a virus causing it. By the early 1990s, HIV was the No. 1 cause of death among Americans ages 25 to 44. There weren't any real mitigations until around 1995. So be glad that it wasn't airborne, because there simply wouldn't have been any scientists left to work out how to keep people alive, because an airborne AIDS would have infected literally everyone and killed off almost all before we'd have time to work out how to prevent it from killing people.
8-10 years is an average. Some people would start dying earlier, setting the alarm bells ringing, but you have a point that 1981 doesn’t represent the point where the clock starts ticking for global survival. Airborne transmission doesn’t guarantee 100% infection rates, and so there’s likely some extra time built in there as the virus spreads. For sure it would be a crisis much worse than COVID, but I dont think the picture would be as bleak for the species as you paint it.
Edit: I was wrong about rabies.
Oh my this is very very very false. People are rarely vaccinated for rabies. Only high risk people such as veterinarians are vaccinated. People who are bitten can be given PEP, but the vast majority of people are completely unprotected against rabies.
If you live in the US there absolutely are many areas that have rabies infected wildlife.
Rabies is 10000x worse to get than HIV.
I'd rather be infected with rabies, and receive a vaccine/cure immediately, than be infected with HIV, which I'd need to deal with chronically for the rest of my life.