By Brian McCombie

Vern Liegel got the call from the state Department of Natural Resources in January 2004, telling him the deer he’d shot last November had tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD. A postal carrier from Spring Green, Liegel, 65, says the DNR employee asked what he’d done with the meat. “We ate it, I told him. We made it into sausage, and most of it was gone by then.”
 Is he worried about having eaten the better part of a CWD-infected deer? Angry that the DNR, which recommends against this, had taken so long to inform him?
 “Not really,” says Liegel, who doesn’t think CWD represents a human health threat. The deer, a buck, “was fat, and didn’t look as though anything was wrong with it. My personal feeling is, we’ve had this [disease] around for years, and they started testing and found it.”
 Many Wisconsin hunters, like Liegel, seem confident CWD isn’t a human health threat, even though it belongs to a family of afflictions that includes mad cow disease, which has to date killed at least 130 people in Great Britain and more than a dozen in Europe. And while the human form of the always-fatal brain disease is known to have an incubation period of up to ten years, the passage of two and a half years since CWD was found in Wisconsin deer without any human cases has apparently put hunters’ minds at ease.
 “I think that, initially, there was quite a bit of paranoia about human health dangers and CWD,” says DNR spokesperson Greg Matthews. “Over the course of time, I think people have become more comfortable with the idea of eating the venison. They’ve been able to do their own research and discover that, to date, there’s no evidence that CWD can [jump] the species barrier” between deer and people.
 Two years ago, an estimated 40% of hunters in the CWD zones refused to keep their deer. Today, as the main 2004 deer gun season is about to start, Matthews says it appears that 90% of hunters will keep or donate the deer they kill.
 Indeed, the DNR itself is donating deer shot in its designated CWD zones to local food banks, after the deer test negative. Dr. Richard Olds, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, as well as the public health committee for the Wisconsin Medical Society, is troubled by this.
 The tests the DNR currently uses, says Olds, are “not infallible. They only tend to identify deer with end-stage CWD, so you’re probably missing earlier-stage cases of the infection.” And while there’s no direct proof that CWD can infect people, Olds is uncomfortable with claims that it can’t. “Statements like that are a bit irresponsible,” he says. “We do not know at this point if people can get CWD.”
 Madison activist John Stauber, co-author of Mad Cow U.S.A., is even harsher: “State officials are knowingly endangering and misleading the public. The feeding of potentially infected deer should be halted immediately. I think this just confirms that what the DNR’s really concerned about is killing more deer and convincing people there’s nothing wrong with eating deer in Wisconsin.”

In the CWD zones, hunters register the deer they kill and the DNR removes the heads for CWD testing. Donated deer go to one of five meat processors, where the meat is deboned and set aside. If the test comes back positive for CWD, the meat is destroyed. But if the test comes back negative, as it usually does, the de-boned meat is ground into venison hamburger and given to local food pantries.
 A pamphlet distributed at these pantries explains that the World Health Organization recommends people do not eat CWD-infected deer, because it could possibly cause a fatal brain disease in humans. It also says the available venison is from deer that tested negative for CWD.
 James Kazmierczak, spokesperson for the state Department of Health and Family Services, says his agency has no problem with the DNR donating deer from the CWD zones to food banks. “The food pantries,” he says, “can choose to accept or not accept whatever they want.”
 Wisconsin hunters have embraced the donation program. The early October deer hunt, says Matthews, yielded so many donated deer that “four out of the five participating meat processors have asked us not to send any more deer for now, because they’re so backlogged.”
 Matthews admits the food-bank program is helping the DNR get over a significant hurdle in its CWD-management plan. Early in 2002, after the first cases were found, the DNR decided that eradication of deer in areas with CWD was the best way to combat this disease. Since then, the DNR has toned down its rhetoric, replacing “eradication” with “herd reduction,” but still the plan is to kill huge numbers of deer any place there’s CWD.
 As with the past two years, the DNR has greatly expanded the deer-hunting season in 2004 and essentially given out doe permits to CWD-zone landowners. For this year, the DNR also designated a “Earn-a-Buck” program in the CWD zones, meaning hunters must take a doe before they can kill a buck.
 But the DNR’s eradication plans have met with hunter resistance. Again and again, says Matthews, Wisconsin hunters made it clear they weren’t going to kill deer just to have the DNR dump them in landfills. So the DNR revived the food-bank program, which was suspended in 2002 and 2003 over CWD fears.
 “This is a way to get more deer to be taken in [the CWD] area,” says Matthews. “The hunters like the idea because they know the animals won’t be wasted, that they’re going to the needy.”

An article published in the scientific periodical EMBO Journal in 2002 found it was possible for CWD-infected brain materials to convert human brain materials. Those conversion rates were low, but were only a bit below the rates at which mad cow converted human brain materials in similar experiments.
 “What that data suggests to me,” says Olds, “is that it is more difficult to get CWD from an infected deer” than it is to get human mad cow from mad-cow-infected cattle. “But it doesn’t seem impossible.” Olds advises hunters to avoid even potentially infected deer until scientists can give a definitive answer. “My family all hunts deer,” he says. “I tell them to hunt deer out of the CWD zone.”
 Stauber, meanwhile, blames the DNR’s assurances that “there’s no real reason to be worried” for creating an unduly high comfort level among state hunters.
 Take Greg Kraemer. The 25-year-old Spring Green resident wouldn’t have any problem eating a deer with CWD. “If it looks healthy, we’re not afraid to eat it,” he says.
 Like Liegel, Kraemer believes CWD has been in Wisconsin for years, maybe even decades, and people have unknowingly been eating infected deer all along. If people could get the disease, he reasons, it would have become apparent by now. Kraemer and his family consume between five and eight deer a year, and deer meat and deer hunting are important parts of their lives.
 “We’re not going to change the way we eat venison,” says Kraemer. “We won’t. We never will.”

On the Web
Info from state health officials:
dhfs.wisconsin.gov/communicable/communicable/factsheets/creutzfeldt.htm
From state agriculture officials:
datcp.state.wi.us/ah/agriculture/animals/disease/chronic/pdf/venison_safety_2side.pdf
From the DNR:
www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/wildlife/whealth/issues/CWD/index.htm
Donated venison pamphlet
uwex.edu/ces/ag/issues/fmd/Donated_Venison_and_CWD.pdf