A new study suggests chronic wasting disease, which is devastating deer populations, may have caused rare brain disease in two hunters who died after eating deer that may have been infected.
Two deer hunters died from a rare brain disease after they ate venison possibly tainted with chronic wasting disease, according to a new study.
The research conducted at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio raised concerns the fatal deer disease could be transmitted to humans.
"The patient's history, including a similar case in his social group, suggests a possible novel animal-to-human transmission of CWD (chronic wasting disease)," the researchers wrote.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it does not agree the men could have been infected from eating contaminated venison.
"We do not agree with the suggestion that these cases were caused by consumption of deer meat," Ryan Maddox, a senior epidemiologist and deputy chief for the CDC, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The CDC and other disease specialists have been studying chronic wasting disease for decades as the infection has devastated wild deer populations across the country. It has been found in deer, elk, reindeer and moose. The disease causes prion proteins in the brain to fold the wrong way, severing neurological connections until the brain no longer functions.
The infected animals drastically lose weight, suffer insatiable thirst and wander in stupors until they die from the untreatable disease, accoridng to health experts.
There have been no known transmission of chronic wasting disease in humans.
The study acknowledges the deaths of two hunters from the same lodge does not constitute conclusive evidence, but "this cluster emphasizes the need for further investigation."
Researchers said that in 2022, a 72-year-old man with "a history of consuming meat from a CWD-infected deer population," began showing signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare infection that affects one in 1 million people.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, is a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob that passed to humans who ate infected meat.
The hunter's friend, who ate the same venison, had just died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the study said. After the second hunter died, an autopsy showed he, too, had Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the researchers wrote.
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