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.
New info on Chronic Wasting Disease
- Thread starter Old Rooster
- Start date
Help Support Long Range Hunting Forum
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 routes, they pretty much figured where it came from and that it had probably been on the wild for a little over a decade. I read some pretty detailed articles about the findings a few years back. I'm sure I have some details wrong, but the gist is right, and you can dig up quite a bit of info on the results of the CSU scrapie studies and detection of CWD in the 1980's and 1990's if you do a little digging.
What gives me the most hope about CWD is that to my knowledge scrapie has never resulted in anything like BSE in Europe. Also, even with BSE, millions of infected cattle were fed to Europeans, and I believe the total number of mad cow diagnoses was in the hundreds. So perhaps if it's scrapie like, it just won't ever infect humans. Or perhaps if it's BSE like, it will only affect a few.
Last edited:
Your example is not true and u know it. They are testing more and more every year. The more positives they can find the more money they get. Prove me wrong please. I will concede that cwd is real but don't spend research money to put up billboards to get your deer tested. Use it to find a cure. We all know if there is a cure the money is gone and a lot of college educated people won't have a job.
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 and they get most of their tests by hanging out in processor parking lots. Even so, they got more positives than the year before. All that said, TX has relatively few CWD cases. Their first documented case was in 2012, not 1967. They also have far fewer mule deer spread over far more acres. The majority of TX positives are in, or near high fence game operations.
CO tracks percent of positives for each unit, and those numbers have consistently increased since they started doing it. It doesn't matter if they test 1000, or 100,000, if the percent increases from 5%, to 20% the increase in percentage isn't due to increased testing. You can get an increase in total number of positives by increasing testing. Test 1000 deer in an area with 1% prevalence, and you'll get close to 10 positives. Test 10,000 and you'll get close to 100 positives. On the other hand, if you get 1% in year one, 3% in year ten, 9% in year twenty and 27% in year thirty, it has nothing to do with how much you're testing and everything to do with increased prevalence. CO has had nothing but increasing PERCENT positive from the beginning. Utah has an area that is starting to get pretty bad along the CO border.
I'm going to sleep and will be driving most of tomorrow, so I'm not going to look it up for you, but percentages are increasing, not just total numbers. Look for CPW's historical percentages. I'm not sure off the top of my head where they post those, but CPW has documented it fairly well, and it can be found. WY and WI have some areas that have gotten well into double digit prevalence that were nothing like that 20 years ago. I don't know if they've publicly documented it as well as CPW has, but you should be able to find info there too.
Il not denying that testing over all has likely gone up, or that increasing the number of test won't increase the absolute number of positives, but if you don't believe that the actual percentage of infected deer has consistently increased slowly over time, just about everywhere that it's been found, then you're just wrong. NY in the only state that has had a positive, taken action, and continued testing without turning up any new positives.
Jeffrey Van Zandt
Well-Known Member
HRM Johnny
Well-Known Member
Thanks for this!I have never put a link in here before so I hope it worksExamining the roots of CWD and BSE
Rick Zemanek’s Insight article (Advocate, June 20) treats chronic wasting as a disease, caused by an unknown pathogen (germ).An alternative is provided by Britisher Mark Purdey, an organic farmer in Somerset who resisted the national government’s requirement to inoculate cows against the BSE...www.reddeeradvocate.com
This is just a short snippet of Mark Purdey's stuff
What They're Not Telling You About CWD
Scientists found through their research that CWD is no different than a well-known disease that affects sheep that was passed to cervids.
www.deeranddeerhunting.com
Check out that article from a Texas biologist. Might ease some concerns.
HRM Johnny
Well-Known Member
You are correct, I've seen EHD wipe out deer on a wholesale basis around me! Had a trail cam picture of 37 deer in my back yard, three weeks later there are four. Dead deer found everywhere. Three very big healthy bucks, one nine point with a seven inch drop tine found in the creek four hundred yards away. Had a picture of him five days before looking very healthy. For what it's worth, the deer herd had gotten way over populated. Ten thousand acres that had been hunted for years was closed to hunting. Deer were pouring into everyones yards looking for anything to eat. I probably contributed to it by feeding them. Which just brought them into closer contact. Took about eight years before they recovered from it. It's setting up to do it again, ton of deer around me. No hunters, to speak of, I only take a few, couple of friends and neighbors the same. But not near enough to slow it from another crash.
Last edited:
That sounds like what we call blue tongue here in Idaho. I've seen one water hole wipe out every deer that drinks from it
Blue tongue is EHD. Just another name for it.
victor3ranger
Well-Known Member
Maybe this could be related to people feeding deer stuff like deer protein feeds??
Those could be tainted from the producer??
victor3ranger
Well-Known Member
Didn't they determine that the mad cow disease in Europe was caused by the feed that was being fed??
