Here & Now

Journalist Ron Seely On CWD, New Research

Frederica Freyberg:

More than 600,000 hunters are expected to take part in this year’s gun deer season which wraps up Sunday. Where is Wisconsin on its management of Chronic Wasting Disease in the deer population? For that we turn to Ron Seeley, a freelance science and environment writer covering issues in the Great Lakes region who, for two decades, covered science and the environment at the Wisconsin State Journal. Thanks a lot for being here.

Ron Seeley:

Happy to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:

So CWD first emerged in Wisconsin in 2002. I remember at that time it was really treated very urgently. How and why has that changed?

Ron Seeley:

Lots of big headlines. I was working the beat at the State Journal then and remember when the announcement was made and what a shock it was in the wildlife management community and for hunters. I had families calling me asking whether they should eat the venison in their freezers because of the concern about the CWD and the potential for it to spread to people in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the human version of the disease. In that first year, there was enough alarm that 40,000 deer were tested. There’s been a sea change since then. Last year, I believe something over 6,000 deer were tested. So there’s been a tremendous downturn in the attention that we’ve paid to this.

Frederica Freyberg:

If there’s been a downturn in the attention that we’ve paid, what has happened to the spread of CWD?

Ron Seeley:

It's continued to spread. The rates have gone up. For the last ten years, there’s been an increase in the rate of growth. There have been a number of things that have come together that aren’t good. One, we — the DNR is doing less testing. Today the testing is almost entirely voluntary. There are kiosks where the hunters can do the testing. They can find out where those are on the DNR web page. But many, many fewer hunters are testing their deer. Like I said, 6,000 last year. That’s a problem for two reasons. One, you have fewer hunters testing the deer to see if it’s safe for them to eat. It’s a matter of health. And we can talk about those health issues. The other thing is the DNR isn’t collecting enough data in a scientific way to allow it to make important management decisions. They have to reach a certain threshold in the number of tests they do, especially in areas where it’s newly spread, like Oconto County and Oneida County. They’re just not doing the number of tests they need to do in those areas.

Frederica Freyberg:

The Center for Disease Control recommends not eating infected deer or elk, but CWD is not known to cross into humans, so why that precaution?

Ron Seeley:

Well, that’s where the science comes in. Researchers are coming at this from a number of angles. Remember that this is caused by a strange thing called a prion, it’s a misfolded protein. And when I was writing about this initially, I remember racing down to campus trying to find somebody who knew about prions. We still don’t know a lot about prions. It was odd to people that a disease could be caused by a protein rather than a bacteria or a virus. So we knew very little about how it spread, how they worked and so forth. So the main thing that researchers were working at was trying to — initially was trying to figure out whether there was a chance that this could spread to humans. Now, we’ve been protected, researchers thought, by a species barrier that keeps the CWD prion from crossing to humans.

Frederica Freyberg:

Has this research changed? Do we know something different at this point?

Ron Seeley:

It has changed. You always have to remember, too, that a prion disease, Mad Cow Disease, did cross the species barrier in England and killed a number of people, including some Americans who ate beef. It has happened in the past. But most recently the thing that is alarming when combined with these lower testing numbers is that in Canada last year, researchers were able to feed CWD-infected material to monkeys, macaques, and those monkeys contracted the disease and that’s alarming. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to reach humans right away, but it means that that species barrier may be less of a protection than we thought.

Frederica Freyberg:

So is anybody sounding the alarm on this? And if so, doesn’t that make that person or those people sound, you know, like they’re taking the fun out of the Wisconsin deer hunt?

Ron Seeley:

Yeah. I think the scientists and researchers who are studying this are very serious about this. And they’re very concerned about the lack of management response. Some of the most important research is happening at the National Wildlife Health Lab here in Madison. That’s a federal lab. And there are researchers there who are studying transmission routes. And one of the alarming things they found, and I wrote about this for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism a couple years ago, but they found that these prions stay, they’re very stubborn. They stay in the soil for a long time. But they were also finding they can be transmitted, deer can pick them up and who knows, potentially humans at some point, by — in tomato plants, in corn plants, in these transmission routes that are much closer to us as humans.

Frederica Freyberg:

So if people are hunting this season and they take a deer, they should have it tested before they eat it?

Ron Seeley:

Yeah. The Centers for Disease Control recommends always getting your deer tested. There remains to be concerned that the state just isn’t doing enough. Since Governor Walker took office and downgraded our approach to this, the rate has continued to grow. The rate when he took office was 3%. The rate has spread. It’s now somewhere around 12%.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We need to leave it there. Ron Seeley, thanks.

Ron Seeley:

You're welcome.