The risk of a CWD spillover event is growing, the panel of experts say, and the risk is higher in states where big game hunting for the table remains a tradition. In a survey of US residents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% said they had hunted deer or elk, and more than 60% said they had eaten venison or elk mea
The movement of meat around the country also raises concerns of environmental contamination. CWD is not caused by bacteria or a virus, but by “prions”: abnormal, transmissible pathogenic agents that are difficult to destroy.
Today, as CWD spreads inexorably to more deer and elk, more people – probably tens of thousands each year – are consuming infected venison,
Well, that was a torrid read
Better surveillance to identify disease in people and game animals is more urgent than ever, experts say. Osterholm says the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to public health funding and research, and the US’s withdrawal from international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, could not be happening at a worse time.
I don’t know, religious revelations nutters might be happy /s
Heaven forbid we stop eating animals.
It doesn’t matter, their point was just ignorance anyway. Prions are vulnerable to species barriers like many other diseases. It’s still not known if humans can get it, and studies on species transmission are producing conflicting results. The Wikipedia article mentions some positive results with squirrel monkeys and mice but ignores some studies with negative results in chimps, iirc.
I still won’t be eating venison anytime soon, even if I ate venison in the first place. Deer species are certainly the primary reservoir so saying “it has nothing to do with deer” is just fucking dumb in any case.