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
Prions are scary shit. Not virus, bacteria or fungi but some wrongly folded proteins that are indestructible and contagious:
Prions are misfolded proteins that can induce other normal proteins to also misfold, leading to cell death and causing fatal neurodegenerative diseases in both humans and animals. They are unique because they do not contain any genetic material like DNA or RNA, and they are resistant to typical methods of sterilization.
Sometimes I’m almost glad that I’m an old fuck that doesn’t have to care that much for shit like that.
Heaven forbid we stop eating deer, though.
This has nothing to do with deer. They are, as much as cows, just the most prevalent species in which prions are found. Prions don’t discriminate and don’t care for your type. I bet they are even able to kill a tardigrade or cockroach
Edit: correction, I read up on it, prions only affect brain cells and function.
Damn: Trump and Elon are safe badummtzz
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.
