Chronic wasting disease
11-02-2002, 04:06 PM
#1
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Lewisville Tx USA
Posts: 6
Chronic wasting disease
With everything I'm hearing about CWD I'm wondering how to tell if a deer you harvest has it? Also,does this affect the meat, is it still at all etable? And hell if anyone knows I would like to know what CWD actually is.
11-02-2002, 10:01 PM
#2
Nontypical Buck
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Baumholder, DEU/By Way of Arkansas
Posts: 2,849
RE: Chronic wasting disease
CWD is a disease that produces an abnormal protein in the brains of cervids (elk and deer.) CWD is a cousin to Mad Cow Disease but it hasn't been found in livestock or humans yet. It's a fairly newly discovered disease so cases could come up in the future. Biologists are not sure how it's spread, possibly through over-crowded herds, corn-feeding, or maternally...and the only testing for the disease is post-mortem. They are still trying to discover a way to conduct, live-animal tests.
It's not supposed to affect the muscle meat of the deer because the abnormal protein is only found in parts of the animals such as the spinal fluid, brain, and spleen and things of that nature, which hunters usually don't eat. But biologists recommend not eating meat of a possibly infected deer just to be on the safe side.
A deer that has CWD is usually fairly skinny. They still eat but don't eat enough food to stay healthy. They seem like they in a daze...they avoid other animals...pace and trance around...and usually keep there head hung low. Basically, if you got a deer drunk out of it's mind, it'd look like it had CWD.
"If a lie is repeated often enough, the gullible public will eventually believe it." -- Paul Joseph Goebbels (Chief Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for Adolph Hitler)
It's not supposed to affect the muscle meat of the deer because the abnormal protein is only found in parts of the animals such as the spinal fluid, brain, and spleen and things of that nature, which hunters usually don't eat. But biologists recommend not eating meat of a possibly infected deer just to be on the safe side.
A deer that has CWD is usually fairly skinny. They still eat but don't eat enough food to stay healthy. They seem like they in a daze...they avoid other animals...pace and trance around...and usually keep there head hung low. Basically, if you got a deer drunk out of it's mind, it'd look like it had CWD.
"If a lie is repeated often enough, the gullible public will eventually believe it." -- Paul Joseph Goebbels (Chief Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for Adolph Hitler)
