5-14 SS Elk & Deer Meat

Chronic wasting disease is found in deer and elk and is related to mad cow disease. I have worried for years about eating venison and elk and I learned something very interesting.

I will never forget this incident. I had a very close friend who is a physician and he lived in Iowa city. He had a huge piece of land, like 1000 acres and one of his biggest hobbies was hunting for Whitetail, of which he had many on his property. We went out one day and he ended up getting a pretty nice sized buck.  Being a surgeon, he didn’t have any trouble dressing it in the field and before I knew it I was being treated to a venison dinner which was to die for. Having hunted, harvested and eaten both deer and elk over the years I once read a story about a Pennsylvania hunter who had eaten venison and ended up dying of chronic wasting disease which had infected the herd he had been hunting. I have always had in the back of my mind that that could happen to me… Particularly as I get older and forget stuff. Due to the recent episode of mad cow disease, I asked Idaho chief veterinarian  Dr. Bill Barton about my fear. “Let’s say that we had either a venison steak or a beefsteak, if you ate a steak, could you get it transmitted to you? No, when they say nervous tissue, they are talking about specified risk materials and those materials are the actual brain, final cord, some of the nerves as they come right out of the spinal cord, the ganglia up there, and those other tissues that we are specifying.