It’s commonly referred to as the ‘zombie deer disease.’
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), which is always fatal in cervids like deer, moose, elk and caribou, is increasing in Saskatchewan—and research is warning about its potential threat to humans who consume infected meat.
The contagious disease is similar to mad cow, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans.
CWD originates from a misfolded prion, or protein, in the brain and eats away at the nervous system for several years until the animal dies.
There’s no known cure.
An ongoing study at the University of Calgary has positively tested CWD in three macaques, monkeys that are evolutionarily the closest to humans. Researchers fed them infected white-tailed deer meat for over three years.
Although CWD has never been detected in humans, health organizations are warning hunters to test their meat before consumption.
David Pezderic is on the board of the directors for the Canadian Wildlife Federation, is a 20-year member of the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation and works in food security. He’s also an avid hunter and loves to eat wild game.
“It’s disconcerting for sure,” he said. “You can’t say with a final definition that it would not (be transmissible to humans).”
He said some areas of Saskatchewan are seeing CWD present in almost 50 per cent of animals, particularly in the southwest part of the province.
He compared the threat to the mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), epidemic that started in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
By eating contaminated beef, people developed the human equivalent of the disease, CJD.
Since 1996, 178 people have died from the disease in the UK, and the European Union banned British beef exports for 20 years.
“We thought (BSE) would not cross the species barrier as well and it did,” said Pezderic.
Animals with CWD are more susceptible to being killed by hunters, he added.
“If you and I were to see one in the wild, we’d see droopy limbs, ears, the animal salivating, really, really wasted away in terms of its muscular structure and its normal fight and flight responses are just not there, so they tend not to run away. They just don’t know what to do,” he said.
Even though health organizations and the Ministry of Environment encourage testing for wild meat, not everyone thinks it’s realistic.
Zachary Hills has been hunting for his whole life.
“I just kind of kept up with the tradition of that 4 a.m. wake up in the middle of November, minus 35 (degree) weather. I’ve always eaten wild meat, like I just prefer to eat something that didn’t come from a feed lot, it’s not boosted with hormones or steroids,” he said.
Because CWD has not been proven to transmit to humans, Hills doesn’t think it’s necessary to go through the testing process before consumption.
It can take between two to eight weeks to get results back if the meat is tested at the Ministry of Environment field office, which is free of charge.
Hills, who hunts just north of Bethune in wildlife management zone 21, said if CWD was more prevalent in the area, he might be more leery of it.
“I’m not saying you don’t have to test. If you want to test, by all means, that’s on you.”
CWD was first detected in Saskatchewan in farmed cervids in 1996, and then in wild cervids in 2000.
In 2000, there was one case of CWD out of 1,000 samples in Saskatchewan. In 2010, there were 35 cases out of 1,448 samples. In 2017, there were 105 cases out of 845 samples.
