Recent content by ImBillT

TX has had the same quota for samples for a few years now and they turn up more positives each year than the year before. Starting last year they began having substantial difficulty reaching the quota(and may not have) because new antler restrictions on mule deer dropped harvest substantially...

Somewhere around Fort Collins I believe. CSU owns them. They're not on campus. IIRC the first wild case to be noted was in WY in the 1980's, but once they realized it was the same prion disease they had identified in the CSU pens, and the proximity to the pens combined with known migration...

Test 10,000 samples in year one and get 5 positives. Test 10,000 samples in the same area in year 30 and get 2,000 positives. Thats not the result of increased testing. Thats the result of an increasing percentage of deer acquiring the disease.

That does not explain how it got out of the pens. But it did, and it has continued to increase in prevalence in the surrounding areas ever since. It has also shown up in high fence ranches in TX, and then adjacent properties, and then slowly expanding outward. That doesn’t hold with a diet or...

They were dying in the pens where they first identified it. The fact that most of the positives come from deer that died of something else is one the weakest arguments from people that would prefer we ignored CWD. Huge numbers are emaciated deer near death have been euthanized and then tested...

Wild game processors are not allowed to mix wild game and beef cattle. I'm not sure the degree of separation or how much of it is federal vs state law, but our local shop stopped processing wild game after beef prices went up during Covid because they said they could not justify keeping separate...

You could just stop reading it while others post meaningful things instead of the provably false statements you've been making.

Plenty of deer have died OF CWD. The fact that most of the positive tests come from hunter killed, road killed, or euthanized deer does not change the fact that CWD isn't survivable. It is a valid point to make in terms of population management. If it's such a slow killer that most deer are...

Plenty of deer die of CWD, but it’s 100% correct that many die with, rather than of, because CWD takes about two years from the time of infection to kill there deer. That said, unlike covid, nothing survives CWD. It either dies of something else first, or dies of CWD. Same for all know prion...

Sig probably buys. Nosler was buying Norma, but starting making their own. It wasn't all at once, and it's possible that a few cartridges are still made by Norma. I'm not sure. They definitely make a lot of it now, and it's no where near as good as it was but still costs a lot. Winchester made...

This is more like two guys on opposite side of the USA getting hit in the head with meteorites on the same day after attending a seance. I don't think there's anything to a seance, but that's pretty weird. Prevalence rates in areas that have been tested for over two decades have increased from...

I’ve seen it published somewhere, but I don’t remember. False positives were extremely low. Lower than I trusted initially, but TX and CO have been testing rather intensively and with a low enough positive rate that it seems false positives can’t be a huge part of it. TX in particular. They’re...

I process my own. All prion diseases are more difficult to transmit to a different species than the one they originated in. It's a statistics game. If one in a zillion zillion CWD prions will end up infecting a human then it comes down to how many people are eating how many pounds of infected...

I agree. CJD is somewhere around a 1/100,000,000 disease. Two hunting buddies popping up with it unusual. The odds are 1/1,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a number I don’t know how to say. It’s the one after one in a trillion. There are likely about 360 people in the USA with CJD. It should at...

CWD specifically absolutely is “new”. It is almost certainly the result of scrapie crossing from sheep to mule deer in a poorly handled animal pen where scrapie had been studied extensively. Prion diseases in general have been here since essentially from the beginning. They sporadically appear...