00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. So we're joined by a special guest, um, Brian Richards. That's right, right, you've got it with the U s g S, the United States Geologic Survey and at the National Wildlife Health Center at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, just to just to start the most basic thing, because we're talking about wildlife disease, particularly chronic waste disease. But um, how how does the how how does the how does wildlife disease sort of fall under the under the bailiwick, you know? Or uh, how's the USGS tangled up in that? Because instead of because I would hear that when I was younger, and I would think that the USGS mapped mineral deposits and U s GS is formally known as the Science Wing or the Science Bureau in the Department of the Interior. Okay, But the National Wildlife Health Center originated back in Fishing Wildlife Service, and we were removed from Fishing Wildlife Service and moved over eventually into into U s g S as part of that larger conglomerate of science. So USGS does a lot of different things, earthquake monitoring, volcanoes, natural hazards. UM. There's a water science center virtually in every state that that deals with water issues. But we also do UH issues in in UM environmental health biology. So it's kind of interesting with the National Wildlife Health Center is we are a very a national center, so we deal with wildlife health issues across the country and internationally as well. Our main campus being in Madison, Wisconsin. We have a satellite UM in Honolulu, Hawaii. You know, I've been trying for the last twelve years to get relocated out there, but you know, so far, so far it hasn't worked. Yeah, and you grew up here. You grew up here in Wisconsin, I did. I grew up just uh, just maybe an hour hour and a half northwest of where we are now, on a dairy farm, and and so really spent the better part of my life living you know, outdoors and enjoying hunting and fishing, you know, just like you know, very similar to the property we're on here today. Just a fantastic place to grow up, and then spent some time in Texas. I did. Um, after I got done with grad school. Uh, you know, you're you're poor, you need a job, and uh you start centering out applications in and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. You know, for whatever reason, decided to entertain me down there for about eleven years. Uh. So I worked at the headquarters for Parks and Wildlife in in big game management. UH learned a lot. Texas is a very fascinating place. Um. You know, from an ecological perspective, I think there's ten distinct ecological regions in the state of Texas. There's something very neat about virtually every one of them. Uh, Texas being so large, Uh, you know when I was there, you know, we figured it was about fourteen hours from east to west, you know, from Houston Dale Passo and probably about fourteen hours drive from Brownsville up to Amarilla. So, you know, just a tremendous space. But game management there is a lot of fun. Uh there you're dealing with you know, white tailed deer the premier. But you get out in West Texas, you've got mule deer, You've got pronghorn antelope, you've got elk and a few places. So a lot of diversity, and you have you know, desert big horn sheep that the state has spent a lot of time and effort restoring sheep, putting them back on mountains in in parts of Texas and fantastic place. That's the way off subject. But how's that project going? Do you still follow that? I keep track of of bighorn sheep in general from a disease perspective, and uh, and disease is a very prominent issue in a in a limiting issue for sheep management across North America. It's always pneumonia. It's a pneumonia complex and when you when you look at the causative factors, it links back to domestic sheep virtually every time. And the states realize that. And you know, if you want to boil it down, if you put desert sheep in the same space or time, you know with domestic sheep, the wild sheep are gonna die. You're gonna lose them. It's pretty It's that simple. So there, you know, sheep management is like a lot of other species. Management obviously need habitat, you know, you need you need spaces or them. You might need to engage in some sort of predator control early on to get them established. But disease is the limiting factor when it comes to sheep pretty much across their range. Uh, there's a few places where, um, where state management agencies, game management agencies identify that there is contact, physical contact or close contact between domestic sheep and the wild sheep, they'll go out and they'll take a herd off a mountain just because they realize the disease. If it gets engaged, you know, embedded in that herd on one mountain, it will spread from there. So, you know, pretty dramatic, sounds pretty draconian, but in order to keep sheep out out there, you know, we have to do some pretty pretty harsh things. Now with the big horn thing, with the desert big horns in Texas, how many are there in Texas? It's a great question, do you all? You know, I have like this very like like this hunter centric way I look at it. I know, I think they give out a tag right there, a big orange tag. It's pretty limited. Yeah, So there's probably a few hundred desert sheep. Um. Some of those are gonna be on public land and some of them are going to be on private land. So the state manages you know, pretty tight, you know, hunting access, trying to afford you know, the the great opportunity, and so I think, you know, I don't keep traffic because I haven't been in Texas for you know, twelve thirteen years so since I've been down there and engaged in management. But at that point in time, it seems like we were harvesting, giving way or allocating opportunities to harvest two or three rams per year, and they were great opportunities. Uh, the neat thing, and I'm not sure if they're still doing it. They called it, I think it was called the Big Time Texas Hunts and people could enter into a drawing and the winner got a whitetail hunt, a mule deer hunt, a prong horn hunt, and a desert big horn ram hunt. And they were all quality. They weren't guaranteed hunts. They were quality hunts. You had all that hit all at once, you had you had to work, yeah, but the people that won that that was like, you know, from a from a big game hunting standpoint, and how could you do any better than that? You know, you mentioned predator control ahead of some of the reintroductions they've done with those. I remember man A long time ago when I was uh, I used to do a bit of fur trapping, and I was reading an article and Trapper and Predator Color magazine, and it was the article something like the five hundred thousand dollar Lion, and it was about they did a reintroduction, you know, and moved in a bunch of sheep into this area, and then a single lion systematically like eliminated the whole reintroduction. And so he got he picked up the name of what that whole project cost. Well, when you think about it, you know, you're you're putting sheep on the mountain side that they're not familiar with, and that cat is familiar with every nook and cranny, every water opportunity, every ambush spot, you know, on that mountain side. So who's got the advantage. Yeah, he just thinks a bunch of weirdos moved into town who are like very easy to kill. Yeah, So I can you know, I could really see there's a place for predator management early on, you know, to help those herds. If you're going to go to the effort of trying to re establish those sheep on that mountain side, it does it kind of makes sense. To try and give them the best opportunity they can. But once they're once they're established, once those sheep know what's going on. I mean, they evolved with predators, so we don't we don't have to, you know, eliminate predators in order to have you know, sheep on the mountain side. But maybe adding a little bit of balance early on seems pretty reasonable. So from Texas you moved up here to Wisconsin. I did. I moved back home. Yeah, it was the How long is the tell me get I'm sorry? The wildlife disease was was the National Wildlife Health Center? The National Wildlife Health Center? How long has that been in Madison? Uh? Since its inception back in the back in the nineties seventies when it us put together and so we just hit uh, you know, it's over forty years the center has been. It started out on the u W Madison campus and then we moved out into our facilities on the southwest side of Madison. Now we've been there quite a while. How many this might be hard to This might be hard to answer, but if you have to take a ball apart, how many um wildlife diseases are are being looked at or are of interest to you and your colleagues. I mean, is it is it like over a dozen or yeah, I mean if you had the ballpark it. Well, we're interested in anything that results in mortality events in wildlife. So we don't really look at the single cardinal that's land outside the plate glass window because probably pretty obvious what happened there. But people are our partners, and our partners being states, other federal agencies, tribal partners report mortality and morbidity UM sick or dead events to us, and that's when we get engaged and we try and help understand what the causative agent was, what caused that mortality event. We've been doing that for a long time, but when it in so that's a very important part of our work because our partners rely on us to be able to tell them what's going on and maybe parlay that into some management information. But then the deeper we go, we try and learn and conduct scientific activities research to learn more about the ecological conditions that lead to disease, okay, and then beyond that start working into, where possible, into mechanisms that might be able to help prevent or mitigate the effects of disease. UM. You know you mentioned kind of a number. I guess over the course of time there have been maybe twenty big you know, disease issues that we have seen that we have worked on, you know, some of the recent ones. Uh, you know, we'll talk about chronic wasting disease today. UM. Not too long after c w D we got involved with it, what is now called white nose syndrome and bats. Uh. Pretty interesting disease, a fungal disease that it's one of the rare diseases in wildlife that truly can in part population level impacts. Okay, Um, if you look at caves or hybernacular where white nose syndrome has become established, we see regularly ninety population declines in those hybernacular and that disease is moved quite clearly from east to west. And I believe it's been picked up now in about twenty six states. So, um and having pretty significant impacts. Is it lethal to a lot of species of bats. Um, it's pretty much isolated to those species of bats which hibernate in caves. Okay, you need appropriate conditions for the fungus. It's a cold loving fungus. So it prospers in these hibernacular be they um traditional caves where bats are are hibernating, and sometimes in artificial where minds things like that hibernacular is a cave that that they hibernate in, you bet, and this is there's something to do with that one where UM they feel that some of that spread is coming from humans going into caves. That's a you hear about that. That's a consistent feature with disease in general. Certainly, we we expect that bat to bat movement of disease occurs with white nose syndrome. But there's also a possibility that cavers spelunkers UM with their equipment, could be moving that fungus, that infectious material from cave to cave. So part of the management's UM scenario being enacted by states and federal agencies is limiting access to caves and also encouraging UM spelunkers cavers to thoroughly decontaminate all their equipment. Um. You know, if you're crawling, you know, in through a cave, I mean you're in muck, and you know you look like you've been crawling in a cave. And so certainly if the if the fungus responsible for white noses in one cave, you come out of that, there's a high likelihood that you've got contamination on your ropes, on your gear, on you. And so if the next day you go, you know, three or four miles to another cave, go in there with the same equipment, it's easy to understand and how you might be moving infectious material. And it certainly looks like most of the movement of white nose syndrome is associated with that bat to bat to. That movement is a gradual movement, yep. But now a year ago white nose popped up in the state of Washington. It's a long ways from you know, the most you know, the other closest closest places. So you've got to ask a question how did it get there? And you could go back to the original question, how did you know the fungus get to North America? Turns out that this fungus has been in Europe for probably for a long time, and uh, the hybernacular there the caves where the bats are there seemed to be in general maybe lower densities of bats, and so a balance has created over time where the disease doesn't manifest in in large mortality in the European bats. Uh. Now, somehow that fungus got brought over to this side of the large pond and got into hybernacular cave systems where we have these incredible densities of you know, tens of thousands of bats, you know, congregated in the wintertime. Put a little bit of fungus in there. The bats are hanging in there for literally hanging in there, I guess, over the over the course of the winter, and it provides an opportunity for that fungus to move back to back to bat to bat in that colony. Then in summertime those bats may commingle with bats, or they are coming from other hybernacular or than they may in fact themselves spend the next winter in the next hybernacular. And so you can see how that fungus has an opportunity to move. But it's long as the fungus take to be fatal, probably most of in this is not my area of expertise, but I'm gonna say probably most of the winner. Um. So, if the fungus is in a cave, it's going to get on a bat soon after, you know, they move in for you know, for hibernation season, and then you know, I think we see most of the mortality kind of in the debt of winter the bats. The bats will sometimes die in the cave. Some of them will die in the cave. Um. Another thing that one of the things that people observe is um. You know, bats flying around in the debt of winter. Okay, when those bats are are all reliant on insects as their food, and if it's zero degrees outside, that bad is there's no food available. So something has aroused or woken that bad up. And it could be you know, the discomfort associated with you know, having a fungus all across your body. Uh. You know, they're they're using energy resources. You know, they're in a very delicate balance when they go into hibernation, so they don't have a ton of energy left over to spare. So maybe that that fungus is causing some irritation, you know, some physical irritation, some problems with thermal regulation as as the fungus is might be causing holes in the potadium on the bat's wing. So they're they're running out of energy and with there, if they're completely out of energy, they're gonna have to go outside and try and hunt, and hunting in January in northern latitudes it's not going to be successful. There are no there are no insects available. So I take that that contributes to the diseases that you know, they're they're short on energy come middle of winter and they just can't make it through. So jumping on from there into c w D and the reason like kind of the reason that our audience, well I know the reason are on it is interested in c w D because we have a lot of people we hang out with and who listen, who eat a lot of venison, okay, avid deer hunters, And the question we get all the time is like, what do you think about c w D? What's gonna happen with c w D? And is my dear safety, would you eat a deer if it has w D? And um, I'm always like, I'm always uh brimming over with opinions about everything, but I'm always really hesitant to talk about something that has so many question marks. And I think we'll probably in talking to you about this, will probably butt up against a lot of those question marks, maybe to a point where you don't even I feel like you know where you you feel like you've moved beyond the known the known science, and you're just going into pure speculations. So I realized that's gonna happen. If and if you do get up to a thing where I'm asking you an opinion and you don't want to give it, that's great. But I think the safe way to begin and talk about this. Can you explain the relationship between when we hear about mad cow disease, we hear about chronic waste and disease, and then we hear about jacob. Okay, they're all kind of cousins, right, I mean, can you break down that fan the tree? Sure? I can t. Scrape scrape is another one. Transmissible mink and cephalopathy is another one. So all right, all of the diseases you mentioned c w D and deer scrape in sheep, BSc or mad cow disease in in in cattle, and that's spongeforn spongeyform and cephalopathy kreuz failed yacops disease in humans. There's another one in humans that we don't see anymore. It's called cubu. Okay, all of these diseases are members of a family of diseases called transmissible spongeyform and cephalopathy or T S S. Great big long words and you look it up in the dictionary and it boils down pretty simple. And cephalopathy is a disease of the brain. Okay. Spongeyform means spongy or holes, and transmissible means very bit simply that a disease can be transmitted from animal A to animal B. It's amissible spongy brain, yeah, something like that, something like that, and so, but it's important to understand that the source of that spongy nous or the holes in the brain as well. These diseases are the causative agent is a protein, okay, being very different than virtually any other disease we know of. You think of viruses, we think of you know, bacteria, we think of you know, in the case of white nose syndrome, you know, an invasive fungus. Okay, all of those are in essence living entities. They have nucleic material they so we can see how they can reproduce, we can see how they can evolve over time. So you come back to the cause of agent. For T. S S, a protein that's referred to as a preon and so you get into it's kind of challenging to to put this in the same sense as you know viruses and bacteria because they don't have genetic material. So these, right, well not really a protein is not necessarily a living entity. We don't. But but I mean, but it causes I'll try, I'll try. So all mammals produce a normal cellular preon protein. Okay. It's a chain of amino acids. It's about two fifty long, so it's a relatively small protein. And so if you go back to what you learned in in biology class about proteins, it's a chain of amino acids that then folds up into a three dimensional shape. Okay, So all mammals produce normal prion proteins. We're not certain exactly what they do, but they they're very efficient, okay, in the body and produced by all mammals. And it seemed like produced a lot of normal cellular prem pro tein in the central nervous system as well. When a preon protein is produced, it's produced in an in an extra cellular environment, or or coded for it does whatever it does. It might be involved in intracellular communication. But then that normal cellular preon protein is broken down, it's recycled by the body, has a half life of maybe between four and six hours. So it's produced, it does what it does. It's broken down by the body and then recycled into its normal parts. Okay, then there is this disease associated preon protein. It's the exact same sequence of amino acids. It's folded up into a different three dimensional form. So if you think of if you took a piece of of a really old rubber band, you know that's been sitting in a drawer for several years. It's wound up into a three dimensional shape. So if you think of that as the normal form, and then you stretch it out and you let it go and it and it snaps back into a different form, that's in essence what we're looking at. Okay, a different three dimensional form of the same protein. And this different form, the disease associated preon, has radically different properties. Um I mentioned a normal cellular preon protein breaks down on its own in about four to six hours, or has a half life of four to six hours. The disease associated form is persistent. Um if it's can persist in the environment for years, potentially up to decades. Okay. It also cannot be broken down by ultra violet light. Um, it's very insensitive to change is in temperature. So if you want to destroy UH disease associated preon protein, you'd have to get it up to maybe six D plus degrees centigrade. So you're not going to cook it out of out of a stake, per se. So erradically different protein. It's the same protein with radically different form and radically different characteristics. It looks like um, this is a more or less like a template where a single disease associated prion protein enters into a healthy, susceptible animal. That disease associated protein makes physical contact with the normal cellular protein, causing it to unfold and refold into its own form and then moving on, so creating kind of a cascading interaction where the disease associated form takes over the system. Okay, And the disease associated prion protein in the body is associated with neuronal death, and so when we talk about that that spongy appearance of the brain, those are holes where neurons used to be and as and as the disease associated prion proteins come in contact. We don't know the exact mechanism of how they kill neurons. What they do. They result in neuronal death, leaving those microscopic holes in the brain. So that's the physical mechanism of how we get to you know, that trend, that sponge a form and cephalopathy. So without equipment, because you are the naked eye, look at like a grossly infected brain until now you want the holes aren't quite that large, So the neurons aren't that large. Saying even so, even so it would appear even if even if it was, this brain was racked with the stuff, they would never like shape change the form of the brain. You look at and look like a normal brain unless you look at it under a microscope and some special standing, then you would be able to see it that the hallmark of of all ts c s is progressive neurological degeneration. Okay, you slow lee are losing the capability to be a functional being. And if you if you look at kreuzfeldiakops disease, one of the human the human t s S. It affects um We see new cases about one in a million to one and a half per million. New cases per year in humans the typical clinical figures, and it is a person in their late fifties to early sixties, say one on one in one million, one in a million in new cases per year. And is that is that globally or nationally? That's globally, But is it true? Is it true in an international sense? I say to say that three hundred Americans a year get this? Yeah, yeah, probably pretty close. If we've got three hundred million, we're probably looking at three cases per year in humans in the United States. And yeah, that's a ballpark figure. Um horrific way to go. Progressive neurological degeneration followed by death. And we think about, you know, as these disease associated prion proteins accumulate in the in the brain and in the central nervous system, resulting in neurnal death, it's easy to see how you know, once that reaches a critical mass, you know, inside of the central nervous system, um neurological degeneration proceeds fairly quickly and is followed by death. So that's the hallmark of each one of the t s S. Was the same thing in BSc or mad cow disease, where you know, You probably remember seeing videos of cows that are just you know, they're nobody's home right now. That's they it's reached that phase. Um another hallmark of of the t s s as tremendously long incubation period. So in Kreutzfeld Jakob's disease, we you know, it's hard to say how long that disease has been progressing in individuals, but it seems to manifest in that clinical phase of disease at the same time for him, that late fifties into early sixties. But you don't know what like, it doesn't spontaneously generate. It has to be the that the person in the case of the of the human form, it has to be the that the person somehow took in the infectious agent, and that's uncertain with m with c j D chrust failed THEOS disease, It's thought that most of the normal cases are sporadic or spontaneous in those individuals, that something just happened. Okay, they're during you know, the course of the lifetime that started that cascading interaction with one or multiple pre on normal cellular preons tipping over into that disease associated form and starting that cascading interaction, So it's not necessarily that they rubbed noses with with another infected person. Correct in in the majority of case is in that classical c j D profile. Either that or we have been unable to identify the moment the causation, you know, the causative event. We can contrast that a little bit with another disease, really remarkable disease called kuru. Okay Couru was first described, uh back in the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties someplace in there in Papua New Guinea in a tribe called the Farai tribe Fo r E, and the Faray had a rather what we guess we would consider an unusual trait, and they practiced ritualized cannibalism. So when one of their tribal members died, to honor that tribal member, they consumed the body okay, and somehow a t SC got into that population. And so when the ritualist cannibalism occurred, it created an opportunity for transmission of you know, the disease associated agent for the disease associated prion protein, and so kuru developed over the course of a few decades into an epidemic situation. It started very small, so when one person died of curu uh, their body was consumed maybe leading to other cases. They infected multiple individuals. Then after a fairly protracted incubation period, some of those individuals died very horrific death, you know, after you know, severe neuronal degeneration. They were consumed and so you can see how that cascading interaction. So they're very clearly there was a consumption you know, some sort of of a foraging habit which lead to disease that coincidentally is identical or virtually identical to what happened with bovine sponge form and cephalopathy or you know BSc mad cow disease, where it seems like we were trying to create maximum efficiency in in a livestock production system. So there's a lot of waste when you butcher a cow, there's a lot of waste. There's you know, the the awful, the hide bones, things like that, and so we all realized that you know, cows produced better with on a higher protein diet. So it made sense, it made logical sense from a production standpoint to take the awful from you know, when you're slaughtering cattle to render it, cook it, and then mix it up into a high protein food source, mix it with other with other forage material, and feed it back to cows. So in essence, what we were doing was we were creating cannibalistic cows, right, you know, we're feeding cow back to cow. It's not a normal it's an adherent foraging behavior. So somehow we got the first case of BSc in a cow. That cow either died from b SC or was you know processed normally at you know, for for beef production, whatever the case may be. The infectious material being concentrated in the spinal cord and the brain of that first cow was rendered not quite effectively enough to to uh, to deactivate the infectious It didn't get it didn't get quite warm enough, and so uh, that cow, in essence was fed back to thousands those some of those animals developed bs and so you're trying to maximize the use of the carcasses, so you grind that up and feed it back to more and so the numbers look like, you know, they were probably potentially millions of cows at one point that we're infected with with b SC. And as soon as epidemiologists, you know, disease specialists figured out, you know, it seemed like, yeah, this has got to be a food born thing, and they were able to figure out what it was band feeding bovine protein back to other cows, and the cycle stopped, in essence stopped, And so we had an epidemic curve that went ran like it looked like it was going straight up a mountain side. And as soon as you figure out what was going on and you stop that practice, the epidemic curve comes down the other side. Now there's still a few cases out there periodically today, but not the volume that there were, Like the US has only had one, right, some coward of Yakima, Washington, right, Well that was the first one. We've had a few more than that. UM. Yeah, it's kind of interesting in that UM we can talk about how c w D moved around, but it looks almost certainly like the United States gave Canada c w D um through movement of captive ELK back in the night or potentially early nine before the UM. It was we'd identified what was going on, our scientists had had identified what was going on, But it's certainly we was prior to knowledge of how movement of of animals could really contribute to movement of disease. But it looks like almost certainly that we gave CWD to Canada and so maybe it was only fitting that they sent B A C back to us in return. So let me back you up a little bit here. I want to get to that, But let me back up. Have are there known cases I should know this, but don't Are there known cases where they could track the mad cow form having passed into a human, like do they are they able to able to trail that? Yes? Yes, pretty clearly. Yeah. We mentioned kreutzfeldi ocups diseases being kind of that classic disease the clinical profile as a person late fifties, early sixties. There's another form, it's called variant Kreutzfeld jacops disease. And the first cases were detected in largely in Great Britain in the same time frame. A little bit later after the BSc crisis began in in Great Britain as well. These humans were exhibiting very you know, similar characteristics and when they died it was very apparent from uh, from their autopsy, from looking at the spinal and the brain material that they had a sponge a form and cephalopathy, and they were able to tie that statistically back to consumption of beef from you know, from the from the mad cow ord the b SC situation. So here's an instance in BSc is A is A is A isn't very interesting disease that it was able to jump across that species bar arier. So it it was not just a disease of cattle. When we fed BSc positive material to multiple other species, including humans, it lead to disease. And so that variant c j D Verian, kreuz Felt, Jakobs disease profile seemed to be humans that were a lot younger, you know, typically in twenties and thirties, things like that. So it looked like c j D what it, but it acted different and so that was kind of the first tie. Was there a possibility that BSc crossed over And now it's it's fairly certain um that BSc did cross over into humans, bridging that species barrier um. And you might come back and wonder whell where did b SC come from? Well that's an interesting question. But one of the possibilities is that you know it originated as as scrapy, you know, in sheep, and that's one of the t s s we haven't gotten to yet, but that's one has been known longer than any Uh scraping and sheep was first document mented in the literature in seventeen thirty four, so it's been around for a very long time, and they probably could only tell the behavior of the dying animal right at that point in time. Yeah, and uh, scrapy has been been a problem for you know, for you know, many years, decades to centuries. But it looks like scrapy may crossed over into b SC and certainly it's it's one plausible explanation for for where chronic wasting disease came from. You know, c w D first described back in nineteen sixty seven in a in a research facility out in the state of Colorado. Doesn't mean it's started there, but it was first described there. And when we say c w D, we're talking about not so we're talking about just members of the deer family. Kerry c w D. As far as we know, c w D is the T S C of members of the servant or the deer family. Name which which species it's been founded, Okay, it has been detected in free ranging and captive white tail mule deer elk, a handful of cases in moose and in reindeer as well, most recently picked up in reindeer. Three reindeer and a couple of moose in Norway. You know, the first cases UM outside of North America other than a game farm situation in South Korea. So we talk about distribution of c w D in those species, and it's been picked up in in twenty four states in free ranging and or captive situations in North America. UH. Two provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada also picked up and described in South Korea UM and in South and South Korea DIN they have some American deer. Okay, Actually, yeah, it's interesting k because the the original animals that died were elk that still had Canadian ear tags in them, and so it's highly unlikely that those elk UM you know, swam the big pond from North America over to South Korea. So I think we can we can pretty clearly identify how, you know, how those animals and how diseased moved UM. Now there's been additional outbreaks in South Korea so it looks like their efforts to you know, stamp out or keep the disease under control, I haven't have had some success, but they haven't been completely successful in that they They've had a few additional outbreaks in Norway. Norway's real interesting situation. And I don't I don't know that we'll ever truly know how, um how c w D got there. It was picked up um, you know, a year ago in um, initially in a reindeer, and then after they did they did some additional surveillance outbreaks a valance, and they found it in two more reindeer. They also found it in two moose. Okay uh. And it's kind of it's interesting if the moose live near the reindeer, they were not. The moose were quite a distance away. And as you're you're full aware, and you know, moose are relatively solitary animals. They don't hang out in big herds. And so the cases we've seen in moose and even in North America been you know, just one here, one there. I think it's you know, less than ten total cases in all of North America and free ranging moose, so they don't seem to be a real big player. They're certainly susceptible um, you know to c w D, but they don't seem to be a real big player in movement of disease. Uh. Now with the reindeer again, as you're aware reindeer are you know, they hang together in very large herds. So science was completed a few years ago that strongly suggested reindeer were susceptible to c w D. But we have not seen an outbreak in North America. So they instance in Norway, now pick it up in three reindeer is the first instance in free ranging herds. Well, the Norwegians are very very concerned about this, and uh, and so they are they're kind of taking the gloves off with regard to management, something that we have not really been effective at dealing with disease in free ranging populations in North America. They're going to take the gloves off over there. And so the reindeer maintain relatively static herd structures hanging together in a in a known geographic area. And so the plan is to um to eliminate, eradicate one whole herd unit of about two thousand reindeer over a fairly large geographic area now it will be a little bit easier than uh than trying to get rid of all the white tail in a region, because they are they you know, they hang together, and they're in more open countries, more open countries, So it will they will be able to pull it off. But hats off to the Norwegian government and their you know, their natural resources and agriculture folks. They look at this. It's a very serious issue. They have observed what has been going on in North America with cw D over the last few decades, and they concluded, hey, they don't want it be when you own when you so far, it seems like that disease, however it got there, is a fairly recent phenomena, and so with c w D, I would argue that you probably get one chance at effective management of c w D in a free ranching population. It has to be early. And so they fully they believe, based on the data they have that c w D has not been there long. They don't want it. So they're going to take the gloves off. They're going to eliminate this herd unit, and they're going to keep all other animals out of the geographic area where they heard where this herd, you know, has lived for a minimum of five years. We talked about that that UM characteristic of the disease associated pre on protein UM not being able to be degraded in the environment. It looks like it persists in the environment for years, potentially decades, and can remain viable and bioavailable. So healthy, naive, susceptible animals can pick up that disease associated preon protein from contaminated environment. If you catch disease early enough, early enough in the epidemic, there's probably not much of that contamination relative to you know, later on. So if you're going to be successful with managing this disease, you have to catch it early and you probably have to take the gloves off the way the Norwegians are doing now. You may recall back to Wisconsin back in two thousand and two, Well hit me with Colorado. So what happened in Colorado? All right? So that that was where they identified it in the US. Yeah, Well, CWD was first described in this research facility in Colorado back in n They were research animals, they were they were captive animals. They were research animals maintained by the by the state of Colorado. Now part of the history of CWD is that there may have been disease research going on with scrapey in that vicinity or the same area, or you know, maybe even the same facility. So one of the possible mechanisms for where cw D came from, and it's not the only one, is that what we're looking at is scrapy and deer. Cw D and scrapey have some really unique characteristics. All the rest of the t sc s be at um kreuz feldacops disease be a be se and cattle, they don't move on their own. We had to feed cow to cow in order to create an epidemic with b SC. With Guru, people had to consume people, okay, in order for disease to move. Scrape and c w D are unique amongst the t s c s and that they are contagious. They are freely laterally transmissible, so dear a or elk can give c w D to another animal on its own. There doesn't need to be any human intervention. Scrapey is the same way it moves sheep to sheep to sheep. These animals are shedding infectious agent through bodily fluids through saliva, through urine, through feces, and that creates a contagious mechanism. If that saliva is taken up by another animal, a healthy, naive, susceptible animal, it can lead to disease transmission. So we go back to the Colorado thing. One of the possibility might be that c w D originated and transit transferred across the species barrier from scrapy. You look at the timeline. I mentioned that that scrapey was first described in seventeen thirty four on the other side of the pond. The first time scrapy was described in North America was in ninety and it was traced back to a flock of sheep that had been moved across the pond, so human intervention. But over the course of the next twenty years, scrape had proliferated and been moved um, largely by humans moving sheep around. Scrape had moved um across across a lot of North America as well. So the time and the place if we think scrapey came to North America around and the first time c w D was described was about twenty years later out in Colorado, that's what we would we would refer to as as as a parsimonious solution for where CWD came from. We can't prove it, though there are other positives. Some people are kind of I don't fully understand why, but there's like, um, there's some resistance to that. I gather because if you start reading on the web, you'll find people making like very spirited arguments that that, uh, it's always been here. Do you even want to do you even care to speak to that? Well? Yeah, I would. I can take take a stab at that. Okay. So CWD in these places where it has been established the longest places in Colorado, place in Wyoming, in the South Converse Unit in UH in Converse County, Wyoming. I think we're not far behind in in Iowa County not far from here, Iowa County, Wisconsin. Places where cw D has been established for a while decades, we've see two phenomenon. Number one, we see geographic spreads, so dear to deer to deer, you know it starts spreading from there. Number Two, we see increases in prevalence or the proportion of animals that are afflicted by c w D in some of these places. UM in UH, Wyoming, south Converse County, in a few areas in Colorado, U just south here in Iowa County, prevalence has reached up into the area in adult male so we're talking two and a half an older aged animals. Deer prevalence in the forty to fifty percent range. So you think about that. So you go out hunting and you're you're lucky enough to be able to tag, you know, in a three and a half year old buck, take a coin out of your pocket, flip it up in the air, and those are the odds that that deer has c w D. So when prevalence gets to that level, we start to you know, I mean, that's the science. The numbers suggest that we're going to start seeing population level impacts that a population cannot sustain that level of disease. So because it's I see this all the time, because it's always fatal, it is. It's a fatal disease. Now you'll get arguments and and somebody right now when they're listening to this is gonna say, always full of crap, it's not always fatal. And the argument that I typically here goes along something like this, that so a deer head c w D and a hunter shot that dear. That dear didn't die of c w D died of paracute lead poisoning. UM. But it isn't if If a disease is allowed to progress, it is fatal. You think about it and what I describe other thing happened airing, some other thing happening. Um, that disease is always going to be fatal. Once you start to see that that neurologic go degeneration in the brain. It's progressive. There's no way to stop that domino effect of the disease associated prions proliferating through the brain resulting in neronal death. There's no stopping that. There's no reversing the damage. And how long could it take? But I guess it's hard to answer because you don't know what the beginning is in UM. Like if you say, like I want to get back to I'm getting ideas stacked on top of each other here. But what is run with this for a minute. When you hear people say it's always fatal. So you know, a deer that gets to be like a buck, let's say that gets to be five years old, he's already super old anyways, Okay, So if it's always fatal, Like, how do you how do you measure that? Because you don't know when they got it in the first place. So I was gonna ask it how long it takes to kill a deer, but you probably can't say, like, today, this deer got c w D. Let's watch and see when he dies. We will never be able to truly identify the effect this moment, but we can track when mortality occurs, and we can look at at um sex and age ratios of animals that are harvested, and then we know how many of them those that are sampled, we know whether they were CWD positive CWD negative, so we can do a little back calculation. We do know from based on studies in in pen pen situations. If you take your garden variety, you know, dear uh, the incubation period for cw D is probably between eighteen and twenty four months, so you want to think it's maybe a two year disease. That animal looks perfectly healthy um all the way through that incubation period up until maybe six eight weeks before the end, and then they start really looking ragged and you think about the accumulation of that disease associated preonic protein in the brain. At first, it's probably having no effect on the animal at all. Then during the course of disease it looks like an exponential curve going up and towards the end, do you see that vast proliferation of of prion protein resulting in your ownal death? That animal cannot survive, So it's impossible. So in the average it's probably about a two year disease. But I want to go back if we can to. We talked about CWD hasn't always been there, Yeah, because I want to lay out people like why I'm asking about that is when and and Doug, you follow this a lot. You can speak up if this doesn't jibe, but so you're you're understanding of Hunter's understanding of this. When people when you get c w D in a hurt a dear herd out um, there's a lot of talk all of a sudden about trying to go in and radically coal the hurt, to lower numbers, or to do eradications in certain areas, to try to contain the disease, or to knock the numbers back so hard that it won't effectively pass some animal to animal. And this pisses a lot of guys off, because, as you know, anyone who likes to hunt knows you want as many animals around as possible. And so when people start hearing this chatter, they get uneasy feeling about it. They don't like where this is going. And I feel that it's a guy that feels that way who's likely to be the same guy who says it's always been here? Is that fair? Dog? I don't you've logged more hours thinking about this night. I don't know if more. I'm right up there with you. Yeah. No, But I'm not trying to do the science. I'm just trying to do the psychology of like the kind of guy who's who likes the idea that it's always been here. Well, I think that they're they're more likely to say, well, we can't do anything about it anyway. Yeah, that ends up being the attitude that I get as much as anything. Well, you know, it's too late, we're not going to eradicated all the like when they had the eradication effort or that was, you know, we had the eradication zone, really upset people because well, how are we gonna be able to do that? We're gonna kill all the deer became a national news story. Yeah, UM, that was not supported socially, was not supported. And so the same thing happened in Alberta. UM when c w D it looked like was was starting to march from Saskatchewan towards Alberta. UM. Alberta wanted to I wanted to stop it. And they were doing everything they can could at that point in time. So they were calling large numbers of animals, UM trying to keep CWD you know, on the Saskatchewan side or drive it back to the Saskatchewan side. They even UM went to a point where they used kind of an unconventional method to kill deer. They were doing it from an aerial platform. And it wasn't a tree stand, it was a helicopter. And so if you want to be effective at dropping at knocking down deer numbers, same as you know, if you were trying to kill Farrell Hoggs or something like that, do it from a helicopter. You can you can really take down a lot of deer in the course of a day or a week. Well, that was it looked like they were being quite effective. They were being very effective at dropping deer numbers and it looked like they had a chance. Well that that technique was not supported. The outfitters and the hunters in that area were offended, um that the ministry in Alberta was taking that many deer for something that they didn't consider to be that big of a problem to start with. And so that social pressure led to political pressure, led to the program being basically defunded, and so Alberta stopped doing that aggressive management to c w D. And if you take a look at the at the at the map that you know I put together of the of the you know, known distribution of c w D, or you look at the Alberta ministry UM stuff, you'll see c to be the marching westward and it's now established and it's gonna be very challenging to to do anything with. There's another thing I've heard, uh from hunter's and that is, well they've had it out in Colorado this whole time and it's stabilized. No, I have no yeah, I stabilization of the population whatever were it's it's no big deal. In other words, it hasn't hurt the deer population. That's what I hear on a regular basis. UM and that comes back to that that situation, you know, trying to identify has it always been here in places where disease has been the longest. We have now documented population level impacts in localized geographic areas where CWD is clearly impacting numerically the deer herd. We've seen cases now documented peer viewed literature period science in mule deer in Colorado. We've seen um white tailed deer in uh in an area in the South Converse County in Wyoming, and documented in North American elk in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. So if this disease had been here always, we know that c w D does two things really well. It spreads geographically and it grows in prevalence. When the prevalence gets high enough, there's every likelihood that it will impact populations. Is there any evidence anywhere that this has occurred historically? There's none. There is no evidence that a t SC has been out there and has caused local or regional population declines historically. And an interesting thing about c w D, but I mean, we'd only have if we're lucky. You know what, what we got a hundred years to draw on. I mean that stuff have been going on. You know, you have no idea, but over the last let's say, say like over the last hundred years, he might have been able to measure something like that or realize something that was occurring. Okay, but what will stop cw D. To date, we know of no biological feature which will stop it. So if it had been there two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years ago, there wouldn't be one little pocket. Yeah. Why, you know, we've seen, you know, we've seen small pockets of disease grow into larger pockets of disease, and none of those pockets has vanished. No, it's never like any area that's had it has never gotten rid of it. C w D, as far as I'm aware, has not gone away anywhere other than potentially in a captive facility where we depopulate that facility. So there's no you know, their populations don't seem to adapt um. There does not seem to be any strong genetic selection for resistance to disease. Now, there are genotypes in each of the three main species white tailed deer, mule deer, and elk that seemed to have some level of quote unquote resistance that resistance, they seem a little less likely to get c w D, but they can get c w D, and what it does is manifest through a longer incubation period. So when I said your garden variety, dear, it's about a two year disease in these in these resistant geno types, it seems like it's maybe a five year disease. So that gives them enough time to that gives many of them enough time to have the life they would have had to end, like they would have had reproduced and then die from the ship that kills year without them ever knowing that they had it. Like if you told me I had a disease it's going to be fatal in one years, I'd be like, yes, that's cool, get in line, right, there's the plenty of stars gonna kill me between now and then. Okay, But let's think about if that disease you have, if they over the course of that hun years eighty years of that you're able to actively give that disease to other people. And so that's kind of the difference. So that dear Dearing, the garden variety deer with c w D, where I said that clinical, you know, it's it's it's inapparent in the animal, at least to us for maybe twenty twenty two months, and then it's sick and it's and it dies. That animal is shedding infectious agents, so it's infectious. It's capable of transmitting disease, probably as early as three months after it gets disease. So for the majority of the time frame that animal has c w D, it's able to give that disease to others and to shed infectious agent out into the environment where it may persist for years, potentially up to decades. Now that that resistant genotype, he's got a five year version CWD instead of a two year so that deer might be shedding infectious agent for maybe four years or even longer before it gets sick and dies. So although it's good for him, it's bad for everybody else. It's good for him or her, and it might be good for their progeny if they you know, if that if that trait breeds, true, it might be good for their progeny, but it could be bad for everybody else. And we call that a typhoid Marry syndrome. Okay, it's not dying from it, but it's spread and sings that are probably gonna die from it quicker than he would. Right now, there's another interesting thing. These gena types that are supposedly resistant to c w D are incredibly rare out in a wild population. They might be five percent of the animals or even less. Okay, So if this was a desirable trait, geno typic trait, one would expect that, at a minimum, it be in a larger proportion. Always if yeah, if that, if that gene had had an opportunity to proliferate in response to disease, they ought to be the dominant genotypes out there. But they're not. They're very, very rare. So it's interesting because you know, some folks in the captive servit industry have proposed, Hey, why don't we start breeding these resistant genotypes and and infiltrate the populations with them. So we'll replace the susceptible animals with the resistant animals and everything will be just hunky dorry. Right. So, the observations of these animals well, Number one, if if, if that genotype is really rare, it suggests that that animal may not be fit, may not be a genetically fit animal. In other characteristics, that geno that CWD resistance may be tied to other characteristics that are that may be deleterious to animals. Okay, there's got to be an explanation for why that genotype is really rare. And researchers and Alorado were able to to actually breed up some of the mule deer with the resistant genotypes, and their conclusions were that while these deer uh looked like mule deer, acted largely like mule deer, they're highly technically, they weren't quite right. These animals just didn't behave the way that there their wild type brethren are. So now let's put that animal in a wild system where you've got things like you've got giant antlers. Where put put that animal who is just not quite right behaviorally into a system with predators over historical time, and maybe there you can see why that animal was selected against that that TSC resistance may be tied to other phenotypic characteristics which are less than desirable for an animal who has to be you know, has to be a hundred percent of ten percent of a deer in order to survive. So it all, you know, kind of boiled together that that resistance quote unquote resistance. Um, it might not be the panacea that we're that we're hoping for the cure of for well, there won't be a cure. We haven't found one yet. But what would it even look like. Well, researchers are working on vaccines. Okay, yeah, yeah, but I mean, but I are you gonna go vaccinate all the year and then keep doing it? Well, that's that's one thought. Now. Vaccine people have worked on vaccines, communic vaccines. Has there ever been a communicable vaccine a communical oh, where you would put it in put it in as the vaccination just by letting me sleep on its couch. That's an interesting theory. That's an interesting theory. I'm not aware of any that has been effective that way. Yeah, there you go. It might be on it. You might be on it. Um. There have been a number of vaccine candidates, uh for t sc s. In general, it would be great to be able to vaccinate cattle, sheep, humans for TSC we have not. Scientists has not been able to administer. If you had the miracle of the vaccine administering it to cattle, administering to sheep, administring to humans, it's plausible and and certainly it's not out of question that it could be done with free ranching animals as well. Some vaccines can be built into oral based formulations where we could put it into something that deer would eat, spread it, you know, probably from helicopters or or airplanes across the landscape and vaccinate animals to prevent them from getting CWD. But you'd have to do it over vast geographic carry, and you'd have to do it for a really long time decades vacine for vaccine. But there are instances where with other diseases where that's been effective. UM with rabies, with raccoon rabies, there's an oral bait um that has been created looks like little dog biscuits. UM. Raccoon rabies historically was isolated to the southeastern States, and it was moved up in a little bit further north along the eastern seaboard UM either by UM, by conservationists themselves, or by state agencies who were relocating raccoons to UM supplant you know, populations that have been reduced by over harvest inadvertently. That's something that's happened absolutely. People have had people have had to do raccoon reintroductions. Yeah, historically, I mean, game agencies have have restored darn near everything over time. Yeah, I thought raccoons were an exception there, just because they've enjoyed a general like in the time that we've been keeping track of such things, they've enjoyed a general northward and westward spread. Humans have helped a little bit, yea. They were like, why are there fox squirrels in Missool, Monta And and so inadvertently raccoon and rabies was moved from the farther in the southeast up into up into the Virginia's And so, as a good pathogen does, it will try and take advantage of a naive, susceptible host population, and raccoon rabies has moved straight up the eastern seaboard where now you know it's it's not uncommon to find cases in places like Central Park in New York, Okay. And and the fear with that is it's a it's a zooonosis, where that a disease that transmits between animals and humans and sometimes back. By definition, that's what a zoonosis is, and it's a face in rabies is a fatal disease in human to the raccoon, to other all mammalian hosts. So now raccoon rabies seems to it wants to move westward as well. And so there is a very massive program that's been ongoing for quite some time where every year, these vaccine laden baits are dropped from aircraft across a swath all the way from I believe it's a long lake erie down along the Appalachians down to the Southern States right now. It goes on every year, and so these these baits are dropped across. It's it's neat stuff, but it works. So you're trying to create a vaccinated path where the raccoons and other animals have been vaccinated against rabies, so even if they are exposed to the rabies virus, they are not no longer susceptible to it. A serious that's fascinating, absolutely, and it's and it's one of those instances said like you come back and say, is it possible that c w D could be managed sometime in the future, by you're making me feel like it's even the vaccine doesn't exist and it might be possible there decades or whatever. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it on the idea that you could in fact maybe so then it would be expensive. So then as a hunter in an area whereas we were talking earlier that it's moving up through, I'm feeling and a landowner and feeling, uh, I feel like an obligation to do what I can and and if I can spread the word of let's at least we're not gonna we're not gonna get rid of it. How the hunter says, oh, we're not gonna get rid of it. If they've had it, its stabilizes all that. I mean, I feel like it's our obligation to slow it down. So to give that to buy that time, that's that's a great point in that. Okay, sorry, let me give you another quick example of vaccine that works. This one is is pretty interesting. This is one that's been developed at the National Wildlife Health Center. So it was thought, um that black footed ferrets were um extinct. They popped up in a guy's dog carried one up to the door. Yeh. Basically turns out they're not extinct. They're not extinct. So they brought that population into captivity and bred it up. Okay, and then they put these animals back out on the landscape. And now, if you are a black footed ferret, you pretty much eat one thing, prairie dogs. That's what you eat, all right. And so if we put black footed ferrets back out on the landscape and and on fishing, wild Life Service in the state natural resource agencies have done just that along some of the tribes as well. Now, what happens if plague comes into that population and wipes out of the prairie dog colony where you live. Well, either A you're gonna starve to death or be you're gonna die of plague yourself, right, Okay. So this is a limiting factor when we talk about the reintroducing the most endangered mammal in North America, putting it back on the landscape. If your food source dies of plague, you die too, Okay. So, researchers at National Wildlife Health Center, in conjunction with lots of other places, over the course of about a decade, developed a vaccine which works. It works in both prairie dogs and it works in blackfooted ferrets. I know a lot of ranchers who are gonna be disappointed to hear about that. Yeah, they could be. But if we're talking about endangered species reintroductions more making a joke about a certain mentality. There is that mentality. So anyway, now the researchers they were able to give an intramuscular injection of the vaccine into into the ferrets and protect them. But now, how do you go out and you capture all the prairie dogs and give them each a shot. It's analogous to what you're saying with deer with c w D. It just can't be done logistically. So the researchers were able to create an oral bait, and actually they tried different flavors to find out which the prairie dogs preferred. It turns out, guess what they like, peanut butter. So they created little bits vaccine latent baits, maybe a centimeter on on on edge, cubic little bits. And so it turns out we can put these out on the land escape in prairie dog towns. The prey dogs consume them, and they vaccinate themselves thereby, you know, at the population level, making them uh now no longer susceptible to play. And those efforts are probably focused in areas where you're trying to recover, you're trying to receive restore the black footed ferrets. You know, a little tidbet for people listeners. Um the most, I would the most universal attractant. It doesn't matter what you're trying to catch. Peanut butter molasses mixed together. Catch me on that stuff. I think, I really think it's the most. I think beaver castor is regarded as like a seemly almost universal attractant to anything that likes to eat meat. And two carnivores beaver castor and two herbivores, peanut butter molasses mixed together is like a universal attracting. Absolutely. I did a lot a small mammal trapping, you know, many many years ago, and you put peanut butter inside of a little you know, sherman live trap, and you end up with a mouse or a ole in there that they roll around in the peanut butter, and then you've got to deal with this grease covered animal. You mix the peanut butter with rolled oats, so that's the that's the component that you didn't have classes and and and oatmeal. Peanut's got stay in power and the rolled holts. Yeah, it probably gives them something to actually they can carry it off to you know, yeah, well, and and it absorbs some of the grease in the in the peanut butter Bailey come back to that, that prairie dog, in blackfooted ferrets. So there are very few success stories when dealing with wildlife disease in general. You know, if wildlife disease becomes established in a free ranging population, it's very pretty tough. Success stories are limited. But it's really interesting through the advent and the development of this vaccine and this oral vaccinated you know, bait being able to put that out there on the landscape, it's likely that we will be able to remove or largely remove plague as an issue with reintroduction and restoration of the most endangered mano in North America. So it's a success story, and it's one it's rare, it's when right. So I heard two different things. One was long sorry uh no. One was that with the raccoons, essentially there was a band that was established to stop the disease from going further. And I think how that could apply to c w d IF and when a vaccine is developed, so you can do that band a containment band. And then this with the blackfooted ferret is stopping it in a particular or yeah, stopping in in a particular area. So those are really two success stories, but there are two very different ones that are very very different. And it comes back to your point, does it make sense to try and minimize the impact and the geographic stretch where c w D is And I think you you hit the name one last thing before that. I want to go into that and end with that. No, I want to. I want to go into that full on, total move into it. But first this is it's gonna be impossible to answer. Um. No, you can answer the first part. I'll give you an easy to answer one. Do we know of a case where a dude has caught c w D from eating deer? Okay, So you wanna talk about human risk? I think it's appropriate. It's a it's a topic that everybody's interested in. I think most people that's kind of where they end up when they're thinking about that. I'm happy to discuss this, So todate there is no recognized instance where a human has contracted a t SC associated with consumption of of c w D afflicted deer. Okay, So from an epidemiological standpoint, it does not look like it has happened. Okay. Now, a tremendous amount of scientific research has been done, many different studies, many different ways, and the bottom line, if I had to boil down all of that research suggests that the chances of transmission of their CWD crossing the species barrier into humans is small. It's remote, but it is not zero. It was very remote in the case of BSc crossing over into humans, and to date we now know of over two hundred fatal cases of variant kreutz feldiacos disease in humans associated with consumption of BSc contaminated beef. Now, they entered, they put a lot of beef in that systems, Probably about at least three quarters of a million animals entered into the human food chain, resulting in approximately two cases known to date. So the conversion rate was very very small. Now, in for if we want to kind of, you know, generalize, if we said, in in experiments in test tube type environments, we can see c w D causing a conversion of human normal prion protein to the disease associated form at about the same rate as BSc does. It's reasonable to anticipate that it's not unreasonable to think that it could happen, said, the risk is very low. We can't quantify that risk exactly precisely. The risk is low, but it's not zero. Same thing can he said, with the chances for transmission into livestock. Okay, deer are out there commingling with cattle today, and if deer f c w D, that's happening not far from here, not not, it's not unfeasible. So there's interaction. Plus that the deer are shedding infectious agent into the environment and the cattle are are exposed to that, just like when humans are consuming venicine. If it's a CWD positive deer, those humans are exposed to the infectious agent. Exposure is not the same as transmission. I said, the chances are low, they are not zero. But now let's add to that equation just a little bit. In a state of Wisconsin alone, last year, there were four hundred, about four hundred and fifty positives detected. Probably the majority of them were consumed by the hunter that killed them. Okay, it seems that you know at least at least some of them that's positives detective, positives detective. So did you guys follow up with those hunters because I heard from a guy today who his family killed five four were positive and he was sketching out for me. Um, he's eating his His girlfriend's pissed at him. She won't eat it. They had a friend that wanted a deer. He want up declining the deer. This is right here in southwest Wisconsin. Do you guys follow up to be like, so, what happened to the deer? The DNR, Wisconsin Department and Natural Resources does follow up, and with every positive test, they provide information back to the hunter and provide them an option. They give them information and an option on what they want to do, and they obviously allow him to opt out of the Wanton waste laws. Right, Certainly, certainly they would they would come pick it up, or at least at one point they would actually come CWD positive material. Nobody's gonna go after you for that, but I would offer up that at least, you know, probably the majority of individuals now and I'm not I don't have their data, but I think the majority of individuals now would say, okay, thanks, but we've we've opted to consume it now, which but now let's think about it. The amount of surveillance that we do is much less than it used to be. First first few years in the southern part of the of Wisconsin. You know, the DNR was testing twenty thousand deer. This last year tested you know, around seven thousands. Uh. I really don't have the funding to do the to do the surveillance. Yeah, So it's not that hard to do some back of the envelope calculations. If we know what prevalence generally looks like. If we know what what prevalence generally looks like in a county, we know what harvest looks like in a county, So we can kind of figure out crude back of the envelope and identify maybe how many CBD positive deer were killed by hunters. I can come up pretty easily with you know, a couple of thousand CWD positive animals killed in the state of Wisconsin every year. Now, if only four hundred of them were tested positive, that means that for every test positive animal, there were probably three or ish three ish that we're not tested at all. So all of those you would think are going home being consumed by the hunters and their families. So when I talked about the risk, so the the amount of exposure doesn't change the risk to any one of those people. But if we think about if you had a scientific experiment, or maybe even not a scientific experiment, maybe buy lottery tickets things like that, the odds that any one of us buying you know that winning or in this case, that losing lottery ticket is extremely remote, But if you keep running that experiment enough times, you might expect an alternate outcome. At the end of the day, somebody wins the lottery. In the case of BSc, at least two hundred people got the bad lottery ticket where they developed disease from consuming BSc positive positive animals. So we keep challenging this system. You know, the odds are low from any for anyone individual, incredibly low. There's lots of things we do on a day to day basis which are much more risky than probably than consuming CWD positive venison, but were going along under the assumption that it cannot happen would be incorrect from a scientific set. That's what I find myself explaining when people ask me about it, is I'm like, no known, no, no, no, So take whatever solace you like you want from that. But it's just a lot of unknown man. So there's a few things we can look to. What is a place called the World Health Organization w h O. Their recommendations are pretty firm that animal material known to be positive for a c w or for any t SC should not be consumed by any other man animal, including humans. World Health Organization says keep it out of the food. What does the Centers for Disease Control say? The Centers for Disease Control is very, very similar. They have a presence on their website, you know, dealing with chronic wasting disease. Their recommendations are things like, you know, if you hunt in an area where c w D is known to exist, you should consider getting your dear tested. And if you follow that, if you get your dear tested and it comes back positive, the recommendation is that you not consume that material. So here you have, you know, both the World Health Organization and our national Centers for Disease Control making pretty solid recommendations saying, yeah, you probably shouldn't need that stuff. So that's from that's from health professionals. Um. The Wisconsin Department of Health has a little corner in the UH in the rules digest. Every state has their hunting rules digest or you know hunting regulations digest. Uh. There's a little presence from the from the Department of Health in there, and they recommend that you should have your dear tested and if it comes back positive, that you're not consuming. Yeah, but man, I mean the implications of it, though, is as you get into these areas like this guy heard from the on their family property, four or five. As I said earlier, four of the five deer they killed on their property had it. If you're going to follow his recommendations at a point soon in a lot of areas around the country, it won't warrant the chase. There will be no there would be no reason to hunt. Hear, you're gonna shoot five deer to get one that you can consume if you're doing the test, if you're following the guidelines. Now I've told this story before, but I had mine tested from here. From here, Yeah, we had them all tested and took him home. Now, Initially I was like, I'm not even get a tested because I don't want to write. I'd rather just live in peace. The landowner insisted, Yeah, I'd rather know. Come on, I'd rather live. I'd rather live in ignorance. Right, just the peace, peaceful ignorance. But then I got to think of to myself, if my wife gets wind of the fact that there's a test one could get for free on a deer and did do it and opted to instead take said dear home and feed them to thy children, And then later you had to say like, oh, yeah, I could have had a test done but didn't instead just fed it to the kids. You know, you can picture all that's going. So what I did that was just like took the deer home, keptain my freezer, awaiting my results, got my results proceeded either, which were very quick by the way here in yeah, so that absolutely I don't want to go so far as to say you're stupid to not do that. Now, the rub is if it had come back positive, would I really have gone and taken those two deer and thrown them in the garbage? That is painful, and that is a you know, a very personal decision. It's based on what you know and your individual tolerance for risk. And that's what that's what I like to that's what I like to talk to people about. Is the chances are low, they're not zero. Is this a risk that you're willing to endure for yourself, for your family, for your children. Are you comfortable saying what you would do personally? I don't think it's really your main because I think my role is to information that I've studied this stuff for a long time, um, you know, to date, and I get my dear tested too because I want more c w D is it's not as thick, it's not as prevalent where I hunt yet as it is here or just to hair south of here, and I haven't hit a positive yet, let's put it that way. But you but you do, you do think obviously testing is a good idea if nothing else. I mean, it provide it provides data to people, provides data back to per science, just to try and track what's going on with this disease. You know, you're kind of boiling in now you're boiling into that kind of that big question, and it's why should people care about c w D? Okay, why care? Because it's been around a long time. Even where prevalence is high, there's still dear, maybe not as many, you know, maybe in these localized areas we see population level effects, but you know that's what I typically here. It's been here a long time. Cows don't get it, people don't get it, and there's plenty of dere to hunt. Why should I care about c w D Because it's a corruption. It's a potential corruption of a pristine food source. Yeah, it's not a it's not a normal part of the system. But anyway, I think we can boil this down and and and a paper came out a year ago written by a couple of people that I highly respect, John Fisher from the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in in Athens, Georgia, and Mike Miller from the from the state of Colorado. And Mike has been publishing about c w D for you know, ever since I think the late seventies or early nineteen eighties. He knows as much about this disease as any other person does. Anyway, these guys wrote a paper and they give they've given some presentations to you know, to state audiences over the course of the last year, and they articulate why we why we should probably care about CWD and boil it down to some very simple things. One is that chance that CWD could cross over the species barrier and become a human disease. Issue. So that's a reason. One reason why we should be concerned about CWD, the chance that it could become a human health issue. Number two is that you know, we have, as I mentioned, we've now documented in a localized area population impacts coming from c w D, and at this point in time, we don't know. Time will tell whether those population impacts will become more regional, whether they'll bread from the localized area to the regional. So there's that chance that c w D could become a population impacting, population limiting factor. That's another reason we should care. Those are the two big ones that they that they point out in their paper. But now there's a third one that when these guys are out talking to audiences, and this is one that's come up as well. It's a highly technical term we call we referred to as the ick factor. You were talking about it before the early Human dimensions research where they sent surveys out to hunters and their families. They did a lot of that in the state of Wisconsin back in two thousand to two thousand three, two thousand four, and they reached you know, they asked hunters, at what point would you have had enough and decide not to go hunting there, And it seems like when you get up in that forty to fifty percent prevalence range where not too south to here, too far south here where you kill that three year old buck and flip a coin, we're in at range that at that point, when prevalence gets to that point, that ick factor might change your behavior and either you will decide not to hunt there, or perhaps your spouse will decide for you that you're not going to hunt there. So now put yourself in the in the shoes of a landowner who's trying to manage deer, keep deer numbers down so he might have some oaks regenerate someday. How do you manage dear without deer hunters? So, even when we get CWD prevalence up in that fifty percent range in adult males, it's probably going to be some time before disease starts limiting deer numbers themselves. So we're gonna have that intervening timeframe where deer numbers are gonna skyrock. But I'll add to that, like, how do you manage deer without deer hunters? How do you manage a host of fish and wildlife species without deer without revenue generator from license sales, from license sales, so it's like it's a it becomes a like no hunt like when you have a radical decline and hunter participation, it does not bolde well for any kind of wildlife that's managed about to state right, A lot of problems for access research the very Yeah, the very information were the acquisition of the very information we're talking about right now. Yea. So so people ask me why should I care? And those are the things that I've been keying on for probably, you know, close to ten years. Quick recap would be the potential impact on dear populations themselves. When prevalence gets high enough kills deer and you start seeing localized or regional population declines due to c w D due to disease. Nobody wants to see that. Number two, the possibility that c w D could cross over the species barrier and become a human health or maybe even a livestock health issue, okay. And number three is that ick factor that when prevalence gets high enough, hunters will change their behavior, quit hunting or go hunting someplace else, and all the rep cuestions that that has on our ability to manage gear and as you so, I definitely pointed out our ability to manage other things. Is deer hunting licenses pay for it all. Now, I know you've been itching, You've been scratching to get fascinated by the whole because you've been wanted, Because I know that you want you you're concerned about controlling the spread, No one, because I I think of that as the like, Yeah, you probably haven't noticed, but I I feel like I've tried to take us from the past into the present, and now we're moving into the future. I did notice that. That's very good. Yeah. Um, and and Brian's actually answered a lot of what I was the questions that I had that I wanted to start spurting out right at the beginning. Um, can I speak for you for a minute? Always? Is that that that that that bother you? No, not at all. You worry a doug during worries a lot about c w D because you're on sort of the you're on like the threshold. Yeah, we're right there. As as Brian said, it's just to the south of us. I'm guessing that we have dear in our immediate area that have the disease. Um into DAT and none off this farm to DAT None office farm. And we've tested every year for the last two or three years. And where I hunt in Crawford County, Um, we saw it coming Crawford being just west of Richland County where we are, UM from the tree stand I sit in. Two years ago, the first positive in Crawford County was killed in a I think it was a four year old buck about three miles to the northeast of where I'm sitting in a tree. Last year another one was picked up in the section just to the southwest of where I'm sitting in that in that in that tree stands, So I'm watching it as well. First you know, you see it coming, and then it's just off to this side. Now it's on the other corner as well, and it doesn't end into you start looking at a mature deer a little differently. You can go onto the Wisconsin d in our website and UH in the c w D section, and of course, as you're saying, the statistics are a little bit different now because testing isn't as widespread. But you can take a year to year over the last several years, the photographs or these or the results of southwest Wisconsin and it shows every section and it started in the what they called the hot zone. And if you you kind of flipped through those very quickly, you just see that boop. It just keeps widening. And it starts out there, Oh, there's a little pink squares here, and then there gets to be more of them, and then numbers keep getting bigger, and it just keeps, you know, spreading in that way. Um. I was freaked out about enough earlier. But now that I've talked with you about it, the part that I didn't that it wasn't registering with me was Stephen, I've talked a lot about, you know, management and why why I'm concerned about it. I like hunting deer, like having enough uh deer hunt. I like eating venison. Um, it's there's the economic impact in the area and all these wonderful things that are a part of it. And and I guess I told you before we started the podcasts that one of our management objectives here is to regenerate red oak up in a chunk of woods that we're cutting my great grandfather's trees, hunting twenty five year old trees. And uh, We've put a lot of effort into a shelter would harvest up there, and now you know there's been a decline in hunters already certainly hadn't been a decline in hunters on this place, but some in the area. But the then mall factor in that ick factor where people fewer people are are are hunting, and well you're gonna start dying off, but not until a chew down every yoak I've got up there, and that would I mean, there's just there's a whole another uh concern that I have to Um. I mean, I was, you're gonna have if it kills all the do you have more oaks you know what to do with? Yeah, but it's not gonna as Brian was saying, it's not gonna Well, it's not gonna kill all the would be a nice problem to have. Yeah, well yeah, sure, it would be too many oak trees to be a nice problem they have. But um, and so I was feeling like, as I said, I'm on the County Deer Advisory Committee, and one of the statements that I made during our meetings was, I feel like we have an obligation in Richeal County, especially uh, you know here a little further north, And I talked with folks around here about this that you know, we're on the edge of it now, on the edge of the spread. We have an obligation to I feel we have an obligation at least to do what we can to slow the spread of it down. And how do you do that? Well, there have been these conflicting and it was actually something I wanted to ask you about. One is population control, but then the other one's demographic control, because the uh, the younger bucks are the ones who are more apt to spread it. Um, at least that's what I'm reading like in Samuel's research. Um, So, I guess I don't have any I don't have. I'm not leading up to a question so much as I'm just making is there a reason to believe that lowering a deer population by some factor whatever slow as the spread? Is that just an assumption? We're making some assumptions there. Um, I can try and address that a little bit. So if we have a population that has prevalence, and we may wave a magic want and we make half a those deer disappear today, what's the prevalence in the remaining population? Right? Because we're not selectively taking. That's why one of the reasons it's so challenging to try and manage c w D. We don't have good vaccines, we don't have any therapeutics that you could, you know, give a dearer dose of penicillin, it would make CWD go away. And they don't stand out when you look at a deer standing in the pasture or in the woods unless it's at that very late state of disease where it's obviously positive. We have no idea whether it's whether it's CWD positive or negative. So when you shoot a deer, you don't know. So that's why this disease is. One of the reasons it's so challenging is because we don't have affective management tools. Okay, so you would say say there, well, then why lower deer population? Right, doesn't make any sense because we're not impacting prev bents or the proportion of animals positive. But I think it's very important to lower to keep those dear populations low. Number one is for oaks. Well, I'm not sure number one is oaks, but oaks are in the equation. Oaks are definitely like equation um, you know, agricultural crop depredation is another. Uh, the number of deer vehicle collisions is another, and disease is another as well. So let's take that population that we waived our magic wand and we made half of them go away, we still have ten percent prevalence. But the key to me is we only have half as many positives as we had before we waived our magic wand with half of those positives, we have less animals actively shedding infectious agents out into the environment where it's going to persist for years to decades. We have fewer animals which are able to actively transmit disease to other deer. And the thing you keep on before was that spursal. Okay, if we have fewer CWD positive deer out there on the landscape, we have fewer animals that might decide to pick up and move their home ten or twenty miles down the road, moving disease with them. So that to me is the argument while lower dear populations, lowering dear populations is good if theoretically, if we took dear populations down to some very very astoundingly low level, we may be able to break or interrupt the disease transmission cycle. And then we would actually reduce prevalence. But that's taking deer down to you know, scarce, you know, five deer per square mile not probably not going to do it. We'd have to take deer down to where interaction. We'd have to take it down to areas where deer would be rare in order to interrupt the transmission cycle. But like I said, those very positive benefits of taking dear populations low. Lowering the absolute number of CW positive deer on the landscape has very definite benefits. Um when in this part of the world we assume we know as dear biologists and landowners who have dear um hunters who spend a lot of time with deer, we know quite a bit about dear behavior. So who is the most likely candidate to disperse to take a ten or twenty mile or even up to a hundred mile hike. Young males when at what time? How old are they one year old, twelve months? When mama gives them the boot, you know they've hung around with mom pretty much their first year of life. When that dough gives them a boot, before you know, she has her next set of fawns, um she'll she'll give those um those year links twelve months of old animals of boot we'll start kicking out literally and a and a female fawn or female yearling will likely set up her home range adjacent to where mom is. Okay, more often than not, you'll find her place pretty close to mom, keeping that family group together. The young male, on the other hand, he needs to go out and find a place and so that might be close by, it might be quite a ways away. Like any of these stories you hear, were some animal turns up three states over right, it's a it's a it's a young guy. It's a young man, a Latin line that comes from South Dakota and shows up in Wisconsin. Yeah, with a radio color or like elk it turns up Missouri. Or wolf out of the up that gets shot outside of guy's chicken Cooper, Missouri. Now those can do it too. But when you think of the predominant animal that disperses as that twelve month old male. So if that twelve month old male has c w D and decides to go ten or twenty miles or thirty miles before it finds its new home, that could be you know, the animal that moves disease. So yeah, I don't think we were. We didn't quite get into it. But we think about how disease moves, how CWD moves, and we have that clearly at that dear to dear slow diffusion, diffusive type movement with an odd deer that picks up and goes a long way. Case in pointed in the state of Wyoming, they had a mule deer I think it was a dough that was CWD positive, had a radio collar. She went over a little over a hundred miles as the crow flies. Yeah, they lost her and then found her again with the UM with UM with a fixed wing aircraft with a with an antenna on it. And she had moved c w D herself and c w D infectious agent over a hundred miles as the crow flies. Now how far did she actually go? Okay, so we think of that slow to do they have like what just that was her personality type? She's no explanation for it. No, no explanation I'm aware with of you know why she did that, but she did and periodically Yale, you'll have animals in they had a dough here um in the early years of c w D when they were doing a collar and follower study, capturing the animals, putting telemetry collars on them and following. Had one that went from outside of Mount Horror just outside of Rockford and then she turned her on and came back. Apparently she didn't like Rockford, so but h so, anyway, that's the that first mechanism is that dear to dear to deer. Then the other one, the big one that we had can have something to do with. We might not be able to do a lot about dear to deer other than lowering populations trying to kill c w D positive deer. But the other broad category is human assisted movement. Okay, that's a big that we haven't really touched on, and there's multiple possibilities there. One is gonna be the deer farms, okay, the captive servid industry. That industry is built on movement of animals, moving them from place A to place B. In the United States, there've been over eighty game farms that have been detected CWD positive. Okay. In Canada there's been just under a hundred elk farms now that where CWD has been detected. So is this a risk factor? Absolutely? Oh, there are some there are some mainstream wildlife groups who have proposed a band and I'm not talking like like radical and virals, but i mean like hunter based wildlife groups that proposed the idea that we should ban interstate deer traffic or interstate deer traffic right. And some states, some states have actually uh, some states have never had a captive serving industry lawful. Uh. There's been a few states that have through citizen initiatives lad to legislative action to get rid of the industry. There is oversight um to a degree, there's over site on interstate movement of animals. But this is one risk factor now and we bring it home to Wisconsin. Here, we've got um, We've got three game farm shooter facilities or you know, whatever you want to call them, whatever you want to call them, fenced operation. There's a lot of them in Wisconsin anyway. There's three of them in the in the northern part of the state of Wisconsin where cw D has been detected. And the typical, the historical, the the response from management community, the agriculture or natural resources is to depopulate that facility to stamp out disease kill all the animals in it, right, So we now have three in the northern part of the state where they have not been depopulated. There are you know, these facilities are allowed to stay in business um restock animals, so multiple CWD positives. These facilities are in deer country, so we have wild deer on the other side of the fence. So some dude can pretend, can pay to pretend to go hunting. That's it. So he like some guy that can't stomach the idea that you'd have to go out and try and maybe cope with failure. Would be like, I could just pay some money and be guaranteed success because what I'm interested in, hey, by the inch, is getting what I paid for, getting what I came for. SAE. That's probably true. I probably shouldn't comment on that, but these are the These very definitely pose a transmission risk and epidemiological risk to free ranging deer on the other side of the fence. And so these are when I talk to people in the northern part of the state, they said, well, what are the risks. Well, the risks are you know, things we talked about dear to deer to deer movement and then anthropogenic are human assisted movement. One of those is the captive deer industry and the existence of these positive facilities where if a fence goes down or there's nose to nose contact through the fence, that disease could leak out of that facility. But another one we haven't talked about, movement of movement, movement of carcasses. Oh well, then there's the third that I wanted to ask about, because there's some of these facilities and you can go out and watch the YouTube videos at these facilities and they're put on by the captive captive servant industry about how here's how we do our deer. And they run them through just like a run cattle through a shoot, and they're taking urine, and they're taking uh, you know, any kind of glace for for deer attractive. And now they're selling that stuff in a bottle. And I mean, you go into any sporting goods store and you see this stuff, are there any restricts? Well, I guess you would know that necessarily or or may don't want to comment, But I started thinking about that. So now I'd go into the you know, Bob sporting goods store or whatever, and by a bottle of do urine in astrius and take that out and you know, spray it around and possibly spread am I that's not risk. Isn't a risk? Yes, it's a risk. Is it a numerically large risk? Yeah, it's hard to say. It's probably the facility. Sure, let's go back to I'd like to come back to that. Let me roll up the carcass manager, push you, because I think that's a significant one. So you know, come back. We've got you know that slow, dear to dear animal movement that it's it's hard to change that one. But then we have human facilitated disease movement. We talked about it originally with raccoon rabies. We moved raccoons with rabies or round. So we move deer with c w D around. We moved elk with CWD to South Korea, very clear. So the industry has a role. But carcasses are another one. So let's say you go out hunting in Wyoming in Converse County and you killed the mule deer buck of a lifetime. Yeah, and you know, five year old deer and like I said, it's coin flip. Say he's got c w D. So you bring that carcass, you know, back to your domicile, and you butcher yourself because that's what you've always done. Or you've got a few hundred acres here, you know there's there's parts left over when you're done butchering. You've got the spinal column, you've got the skull, unless it's all the parts where where infectious agent is concentrated. What do you do with that waste material? Do you dump it out on the back forty? If you do that, does that constitute a very real risk of introducing infectious agent to a naive, susceptible host population. The answer is yes. So many states and many of your localities have introduced bands on carcass movement. Minnesota's done it, um, you know, Michigan's working on one. We've had some some carcass movement regulations. Processed meat and a clean skull cap, but but leave the rest behind type thing. And so that's a very real risk that has been dealt with by regulatory means. But regulations don't cure everything. We need education to go along with it. Because if you went to Colorado and or Wyoming and killed that big deer and brought at home, you might have not know that you were violating the law. So we have to have education to go along with it. And and and the answer is to that, if you know, if you're going to do that, make sure that those carcass parts don't end up out on the back forty, that they go to a landfill or end up underground where any infectious agent is not available to be picked up, ingested, or inhaled by another deer. So that one's easy if we know what we're doing and we pay attention to it. So the carcass movement bands um have have a place. But when we when we boil it down, is there a way to appropriately manage carcasses? The answer is yes, make sure it ends up underground. You know what's interesting about those bands is that it's never like Colorado saying don't export. Yeah, nobody hasn't. When you guys leave, leave all the bones and the skulls here. Don't bring from Colorado here, right, It's an important people have it like at that shot out of here. Well, I can remember my dad going out west hunting and they would bring the whole the mule, deer, the elk, whatever, you know. They packed them with ice and brought him back I remember, you know, butchering him at the facility here. Where did those bones end up in it? I used to be a little bit of a conspiracy theorist in this whole thing. Oh, there had to be some guys down there who brought in among those big monster bucks from someplace to improve their genetics. Well that sounds crazy, doesn't it. So they let it out down there and in the Mount Horribor area, and so it's yeah, well they don't shoot the deer with the tag and it's here, you know that kind of thing um or or it was a facility, there was something like that, And then it could have been innoculous, just just some old boy like my dad who you know, bringing is is and and that's what they did, you know, it's just what we did. I know a lot of people that would like to pin it on your dad. Well it's it's unlikely but that anyone individual. But if we're looking for theories about how disease got to a place like Wisconsin, nine hundred miles from the nearest infected area in the state of Colorado, we have those possible explanations. Was it dear to deer to deer it's not very likely that the deer from Colorado got up and walked across the Mississippi and came to Mount horrib to settle down. So then we start looking at the other possibilities. Could it have been human assisted movement, either of live deer to release out in that area. Yeah, it's possibility, pretty hard to prove at this point in time. Could it. Could it have been a hunter who inadvertently brought a positive back and you know, and carcass parts ended up out on the back. Forty Absolutely, that's possible. Could it have been other materials? Um, it's real interesting that that prions themselves, It turns out bind to some soil particles. They bind the clay particles much better than they do to sand particles. And and that's when we think about that deer who's shedding infectious agent out into the environment. Well, when it rains, it all out of wash away in to the into the river and will end up in the Mississippi. And it ought to be a problem down in the in the Gulf Delta, right, But it turns out the preons themselves can bind very tightly. They form a chemical bond with some soil particles. Which helps explain why they don't wash away and why they remain in the environment because they can be bound to soil particles the road like sand. Now from a from a disease standpoint, there's another part of that that it turns out when preon protein molecules are bound to clay particles, they are more infectious than they were on their own. It turns out that their infectivity is increased nearly seven hundred fold in that bound state. Okay, and we've seen where you know, a cow's stomach is a pretty harsh place, and you would think that if you put preons into a cow's stomach that's four chambered stomach, that it would degrade. And actually it does degrade. Preon is quite a bit. It lowers the tighter. But if these preons are bound to soil particles, it increases their infectivity. So maybe these soil particles help act as chaperones through the system to get in so they're bound tightly and they're more infectious. Now you've talked about the possibility of a bottle of urine. Okay. So urine is collected at captive deer facilities okay um or captive elk facilities where they have greats under the floor and the deer you know, urinate and so the it's it's collected up in theory, you know, process purified to some degree um and aggregated together, and then sooner or later it ends up on a sporting good shop or you can buy it online. Things like that. For a lure, you know, doan estrius. So there's currently a great debate going on and some states have taken proactive action and they've said, hey, don't use urine based lures in our states. Several states have done that because they identify that there is a risk, a small risk, but there is a risk. And if we've learned anything in Wisconsin, if you don't have c w D, now you want to keep it that way. And so other states have paid attention. They're putting in strong protective measures. Don't bring carcasses into my state, don't bring live deer into my state, and don't use urine based lures in my state. And that's a decision that a state makes on their own. Yeah, I mean, so a state, even if you just look at the state's function as like protecting you know, even from the most conservative thing, facilitating business you're protecting the deer hunting industry, protecting the bigger industry than the piss industry, and it's a much bigger industry than the captive deer industry. Wisconsin makes way more money selling deer license and having people hunt wild deer than they do being a than they do being a service for the captive deering. So science has shown pretty clearly that you know, a deer with c w D is shedding infectious agent in their urine, but it's pretty dilute, okay. So the argument is that if you have a bottle, you know, a one once bottle of deer urine, it's not enough. Even if it did have CWD preons in it, it's likely not enough to transmit disease. That okay opinion from the industry or from science. By it it's promoted by it's promoted. That's that's promoted by the industry right now. Um, that the bottle of urine has it's it's negligible risk, okay. But one of the things, So we just talked about what happens to a preon protein when it binds to soil particles, and that really hasn't been entered into the equation. So how do people use dealer? I mean, some of them are gonna squirt it into cotton balls in the top of an old thirty five millimiter film cam canister case, hang it from a branch of a of a tree. Others are gonna spray it all over, either a mock or a real scrape, which is kind of a deer magnet, so lots of animals come there. So now, let's just suppose that a bottle of urine did have preons in it, which wasn't enough if we squirted into deer's mouth, it wouldn't be enough to give that dear c w D. But now we're squirting it on the ground where those prens might bind to soil particles, and a deer might lick that soil and ingest that preon protein that's now bound to clay particles. The the infectivities. I think the paper says SI I was rounding to seven hundred, So that hasn't been entered into into the equation yet. Is that enough? I don't know. I can't honestly, I can't answer that question. Is that enough of an increase in concentration where that bottle of urine constitutes a risk. I can't answer that question, but a question I can answer that if you are a state agency whose responsibility is to look out for the welfare of that dear resource for current and future generations of people in your state, if you've seen the impacts of c w D and you believe you don't have it, and you want to do everything you can to keep c w D out of your state, is it a reasonable thing for that state to promulgate rules to say, hey, we'd prefer if you didn't use urine based lures in your in our state. I think it's very reasonable that a state making that decision, they've looked at the information, they're making a calculated decision on the level of risk they're willing to incur on behalf of the people of their state. How can you argue with that? And if and if an overwhelming body of evidence were to emerge that contradicts that they could walk back lift the band? Aren't there a synthetic based lures that that people use? And I don't know. I don't. I gave up on that stuff. I figure if I can't sitting in a tree stand, if I can't have a deer walk up close to me. You know, probably having lures isn't the way I want to go. Well, folks will try all a man or stuff. All you have to do concluding thoughts, I are just smoking cigarettes something your stand brings him in. Well, I know that. Well, Doug Buckman during um there's special has special properties of his own urine, which is very enticing to dear yawn scrape. Yes, photo, he's a lot of photo documentary evidence that the dog buck Man urine is the most potent lure. But I don't know, I want I'd have to test your ear and make sure it's not positive. Yeah, yeah, he was actually been sending a urin around from the c w D area. You gotta concluding thought, I've I've got I've got a few. If you humor me, give me a couple of minutes here, because it's kind of boiled down. I get asked all the time, what can I do? What can people do about CWD? And people and individual hunters can't cure c w D. They're not gonna create the vaccine things like that, so but what can people do? Well, one of the things I think is really important is to be knowledgeable about really what CWD is. It's things that we've talked about today. Now, if you go to some sportsmen's clubs, or go to hunting camps, or go to a tavern and you get into a conversation about CWD, you'll hear some things about CWD. They'll make you scratch your head. Could really and and so alternative points of view are out there. There's places on the on the Worldwide Web that you know, if you tripped looked up facts about CWD or the truth about CWD, you might hear some things that are vastly different than what we've heard today. A good Google uh tip is never type in the truth about the truth about X. It's a good way to get the not truth. Ye. I think it's really important if people have a better understanding of what c w D is, what the risks are, what the potential outcomes down the road are. That they'll care about c w D, but they need to learn about it. They need to get accurate information. So if you're gonna Google, go to scholar dot Google dot com and enter in c w D and pre on disease, and there you'll get you'll get all your links will be peer reviewed scientific publications so learn about c w D and and us CWT kind of the way we're doing here today. I think that's really really important. Another thing is obviously going to be working with government. If you don't like what you see, if you don't like the fact that you know, captive servant operations with c w D are still out there on the landscape, haven't been depopulated, work with government. If you don't like the way your natural resource agency is responding to c w D, work with government. It's not gonna do much good to sit in hunting camp and, you know, gripe about the d n R. That's it's really not effective. It might be fun, it might be entertaining, but it's really not effective. So work with government at the appropriate levels and recognize and engage and recognize that the d NR is has you know, Natural Resource Agency and Agricultural Agency are working with a set of laws created by legislators, and so quite often the d n R is not the appropriate level. If you want to seek change, you're gonna have to talk to the just is. He's talks a lot about people who are blaming the d n R, blaming the State Fish and Game Agency for things that are coming from the legislature, right, the DNR has to work within the statutory guidelines provided by the legislation and those people are voted in and they are responsible to uh to their constituents. So working with government is a big one. Another way of working with government, though, is is promoting surveillance. You know, we've seen in in state after state there's fewer dollars available for surveillance. So the Wisconsin d n R has surveillance has gone down. Many other states surveillance has gone down because they don't have the money to do it. So the only way we learn more about distribution and prevalence is CWD is to do surveillance. So that's another way you can have an impact by talking to government. Another one's promoting research things, you know, epidemiological research, learning about how disease moves, learning about more about the risk to humans, learning about the risk to domestic livestock, learning about the possibilities of vaccines. We do that through research, and the amount of money available for for disease research has diminished greatly over time. So there's places where you can work with government. But now even more what can a hunter do well? We talked about it you can hunt deer. You know, they say, I believe that. You know, taking deer offul landscape, reducing densities is good from a whole host of reasons. In addition to disease management. If you feed and bait, those are probably not good things. Those could be considered risk factors. So the analogy they're a great one is if you have young kids and you put them in daycare. If all the kids in daycare were healthy, daycare would be healthy and your kid would never come home and give you some illness that you didn't want. But that's not the reality. So one little kid will go into take care with the cold or the flu, spread it around to everybody else, and then those children go home to their respective families. So now let's move that into the deer world, where if you're baiting out there on the landscape, you're putting corn or some other attractant out there. If all the deer are perfectly healthy, it's not a bad idea, right, Okay, there's no risk of disease transmission. But now let's put a little bovine tuberculosis in the system. Let's put a little bit of chronic wasting disease into the system. And now if we have one sick animal coming into that pile of bait or that attractant, there, they shed infectious agent into that bait, changing saliva and breath exactly. So multiple animals are coming in, so it elevates the risk of disease transmission. So feeding and baiting, anything that artificially congregates animals in association with disease enhances their risk. Carcass management, there's a big one we talked about. So if you're gonna go hunting in you know, if I'm gonna go hunting in in Iowa County, Wisconsin, and I live in northern Wisconsin, or I live in Michigan or Minnesota, if I can get it across the border, if I butcher that animal myself, make sure that the carcass parts end up not in reach of a deer, not on the back forty preferably at a landfill. That's a solid thing that hunters can do to help reduce the chance of of CWD loving bearing on your own how deep uh, probably deep enough where a raccoon is not going to dig it up and expose it back back to the deer um. Now, some people might might go, oh, you shouldn't have said that something like that, because there is obviously always a chance that effluent would percolate down get into groundwater. But that mantra back from the seventies dilution is the solution to pollution probably applies here. That getting those carcass materials out of where they are a bile available to healthy, naive, susceptible deer. That's what's key. Um, if you wanted to get technical, if you want to, if you really want to stop pre on movement, you go to a landfill that uses a clay liner system. Remember, clay binds pre on particles. What turns out, if you put a clay liner under a landfill, you will stop pre on movements so it won't go into the effluent that then gets discharged out onto the farmer's fields. Okay, so there's there's science behind that. I think the last thing that people can do to learn more about is if, especially if you hunt in an area where c w D is, get your carcasses tested. I mean, that's in line with recommendations coming from the World Health Organization in the Centers for Disease Control or the surrounding area YEP. If you're if you're close to disease, consider having your deer tested. Now, I'm not going to tell you not to eat it. That's your personal decision based on your own capacity to tolerate risk. But you've learned about c w D, you're doing your best not to contribute to movement of CEDA be a D. Getting that dear tested makes a makes a you know, kind of common sense. So so those are the kinds of things like I say, when I walk into an audience and people say, well, what can we do? That's what I always try and close with, here's the concrete things you can do. You can't fix it, but you can help. That's good stuff, man. And for most people to test it, it's their UM, local Game and Fish or Department Natural Resource. Talk to your natural resource the agency UM if they are not able to accommodate it, and I believe most can, but if they're not, you could talk to a veterinarian. You know, a local veterinarian who has the ability to collect this tissue samples for a hunter and then submit them to a state diagnostic laboratory. So it's it's doable any place here in the Cheese State. What do you guys call this state Wisconsin? Yeah? I mean you know, I was trying to be like a bad writer who uses like little synonyms here and there. So let's just this one year old crooner like that kind of line, uh Wisconsin. Yeah. But what is this? Help me out? Man? Here in America's dairy land. Uh, it's free. Yeah, And I would say this I know in our area. UM over at rock Bridge, at the rock Bridge Store, an old and dear friend of mine, Sharon Miller UH is one of the testing UH facilities, and her son has gone through the training and takes out the lymph notes and does all that work. It's real simple. You can just drop the head off obviously. I you've got a big old monster buck and stuff that you're gonna want to get mount takes. But they'll they'll work with you on that. And then, UM, so that's on this side of the county, or it's in just a few miles this way, but then a few miles the other way over in Sauk County in Bear Valley, which is one of the high prevalence areas. UH A live look taxidermy over there. Bill you can't think of Bill's last name right now, but he mounted the standard. Um he also uh is a testing for not a testing facility, but a drop off facility, and they too will take out the limp nodes and do that whole thing. Yeah, bring the whole damn head down, fill out a piece of paper, and then it's your Your results were sent uh sent to you. So I'll give my concluding thought. How's that hit it? Man? Uh? I feel better uh listening to you today, and I thank very thank you very much for that. I mean, I feel like I've I've been spending a lot of time learning about it, uh as much as I can. And then there is a lot of misinformation and uh, but most of what I have read you um explained today and some of the ways that I didn't quite get it and then boiling it down, which I think is so important. Uh. And so this has been a really important discussion for me. And like you're an Oak, that you're an Oak guy, if that makes a big difference too. So I saw Doug lose a big bet on Oaks one time. That was true, but I'm not sure about the person who decided. I'm still not happy with how we decided that. Um. Yes, it's ten years ago. I need to hear this. How many there's an oak tree drop, you know, it's one of those that was one of those. Uh so, and I think you gave you reinforced much of what I'm trying to promote. One of the things I did want to clarify though, it in the state of Wisconsin that the Department of Natural Resources, Yes, enacts with the legislature. Uh. In most cases, legislature tells them to UM. But deer farms are under the purview of the Department Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. It's farming, not It's a common problem. Yeah, and that's those two things are very ins two agencies are seemed to be very different and in it it the relationship varies depending on what state you're in. In some states, the Agriculture and the Natural Resource Agency work very very closely together, and in others they don't work so closely together. And in other states they have diametrically opposed opinions about you know, how management should do. So Yeah, yeah, there's multiple um. Some states, Uh, management of the captive industry is under the Natural Resource Agency. Uh, there's it's under agriculture. It just depends on where you go. Man. Well, anyway, thank you very much. This is yeah, fabulous for you guys. Are welcome. This was enjoyable. Um my concluder, Brian, thank you for like, uh being a federal researcher. Man. Uh, there have been better times to be a federal scientist than to bring it back. We're gonna bring it back to where it's like where you guys get the credit you deserve. It's intriguing because you're able to look at stuff. You're able to look at stuff and look at problems that were gonna be facing down the road, and oftentimes private industry just isn't on their radar yet. And you need to have some people who are able to exercise a level of curiosity and look out at what might be coming down the road and have the funding necessary to do so, to to fill in some of the blanks for us and give it us a sense of what's coming. Because it's just we would still be nowhere on this if we were relying on private industry. Who the hell is gonna put money into this? Well, go back to the case of plague in prairie dogs and blackfooted ferrets. It took over a decade to develop a vaccine candidate and to be able to then create an oral formulation in order to solve an endangered species problem. Them. Where is the incentive outside of government research facilities to have the wherewithal and the capability to be able to do that and the patients to be able to do it. There is no place else. So there's value. I believe there's definitely value, UM, and success stories are not that common, but you have to work on these problems. UM. If we value our natural resources in our wildlife, we're posed today with more diseases than ever before. UM. Emerging infectious diseases are are rampant out there on the landscape, and if we don't learn about them more, we don't we will not learn about those diseases, we will not learn about what caused those diseases, and we will not maybe most importantly, learn how to effectively deal with, to mitigate or manage those diseases. So I appreciate the UH. I appreciate the compliment. Yeah, Well, UM, I feel you know, I'm I'm indebted to you and and for for the lifestyle I have in the natural resources I enjoy. UM. I feel indebted to people like you and generations past who committed themselves to a professional occupation of you know, working on natural resources. It's enjoyable. Thank you, Thanks for joining us. You're welcome. I appreciate the opportunity. And Dog, thanks for wholesness at your house, manure family, even if this might be the last time the family farmers, even though I just met a new person to day. Where I'm gonna start hanging out instead of Doug's place. It's just down the road door, so we're gonna stop body easier. I'll yell up. I told Dog come use the bathroom and get an internet connection out there, all right. Thanks for joining