Bugging Out & Hunting Deer? Some Deer Are Easy To Catch & Kill. This Could Be A Warning Of A Deadly Disease Similar To Kuru.

Kuru, or human-acquired prion disease linked with devouring human brains, a practice still found in some cultures in Papua New Guinea. I once nursed a man with Human-variant CJD or spongiform encephalopathy. It was harrowing to watch a neurological deterioration in real time. Kuru should terrify the hardest-hearted SARS-Covid-19 denier.

Collapse hasn’t brought us to the point of eating our neighbours yet, but cannibalism is not exactly safe. The question is how safe venison is and how many UK deer are infected with CWD, a prion disease affecting the deer family and the land on which they live, eat and die. A prion, not a virus or bacteria, an ancient protein devoid of DNA. This tough building blocks of life wreaks havoc in the lives of the deer they infect. Turning their brains to sponge and their nerves to threads. Not dissimilar to Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis or Mad Cow Disease, Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) widespread in the USA, is now increasingly common in the UK.

“Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by infectious prions (PrP^CWD) affecting cervids. Circulating PrP^CWD in blood may pose a risk for indirect transmission by way of hematophagous ectoparasites acting as mechanical vectors.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37188858

Bugging out to the woods among deer and their ticks exposes people to Lyme’s disease and possibly a variant of human spongiform encephalopathy. Adding disease to poor training, the wilderness finds new and interesting ways to kill the under-skilled.

Deer more likely to be killed by hunters are those with CWD

Can you get CWD from ticks? Maybe, but no known evidence yet. Whose panicking

“This study presents a cluster of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) cases after exposure to chronic wasting disease (CWD)-infected deer, suggestive of potential prion transmission from CWD-infected deer to humans.”

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000204407

There have been no outbreaks in the UK but in 2016 it was diagnosed in wild deer in Norway, the first cases of CWD in Europe. The disease has also killed wild and farmed deer in North America.

The 2016 qualitative risk assessment on the risk of a cervid transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) being introduced from Norway into Great Britain concludes that the public health risk of CWD isn’t known. Current assessments suggest the risk is very low.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/chronic-wasting-disease

SARS-Covid19 made the jumb to humans from bats. Ebola made the jump from monkeys, the Bubonic Plague, from rats to humans all via the food chain, either directly or indirectly.

Mad cow disease? Very likely, and it’s also caused by a prion.