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08/29/2002 "This is the kind of interesting alternative information available on the CAIDS website"

July 22, 2002 Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Dane County Task Force Meeting on Chronic Wasting Disease

Opposition remained against using the county's landfill as a repository for the millions of pounds of potentially infected deer carcasses from the Deer Wars. While many task force members and technical experts believe properly conducted incineration is the safest means, the DNR persists in pursuing landfills because they don't believe they can afford the cost of proper incineration.

In comments made by Tom Hauge of the DNR, I noted some new spin. The one week a month "summer shooting periods" are now being described as not being conducted for "eradication" but for the purpose of collecting samples for validation of testing procedures. Seems like a case of the goal shifting to be more consistent with their lack of success in killing large numbers of animals.

Hauge also made reference to a lower kill target for the upcoming season (dropping from 25,000 deer to 18,000) without specifically mentioning that Eradication itself had been reconsidered. It seems the DNR is now considering the possibility that killing 25,000 deer is simply an impossible goal and thus is doing early damage control.

A week earlier, another DNR official - deputy director Sarah Hurley - orchestrated another preliminary Protect the DNR Posterior move. An article in the Rocky Mountain News quoted her as indicating that every area in the state is a potential source of the disease-causing prion protein because ". . . people from every county have hunted in the 361-square mile area of southwest Wisconsin where 18 infected deer were discovered." What the department doesn't know is whether those hunters killed any deer infected with chronic wasting disease and, if they did, what happened to parts of the carcass, including the head, that contain the deadly infectious agents, she said.

Thus if this fall or winter the DNR finds Chronic Wasting Disease elsewhere in Wisconsin, deputy Hurley has laid the ground work for a handy theory that allows them to continue to maintain that Mount Horeb is the Garden of Eden for CWD in Wisconsin.

The most interesting presentation of the evening was by John Stauber, an investigative reporter and co-author of "Mad Cow, USA." Stauber has talked to scores of researchers and studied the professional literature on Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSEs) of which CWD is the deer variety of this general disease. The full text of his presentation is available here. Stauber's work with bovine form of TSE (Mad Cow disease) has lead him to investigate the game feed industry and changes in feeding practices. In our zeal to keep costs low and avoid wasting animal tissue, animal parts that formerly were "wasted" are now reprocessed into animal feed. For example, Stauber cited that in 1995 26,000 road-killed deer in Wisconsin were reprocessed into animal feed. Get the picture? How many of these road kill might have had CWD; where did this feed go, etc.?

I found most interesting the following: "The idea that the Eradication Zone is a unique hot spot in Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest is ridiculous, wishful thinking at best, and to proceed with current plans based on this assumption is a huge misstep and waste of time, resources, and public credibility. . . . The DNR has already spent almost a million dollars killing and testing deer in the Eradication Zone. Had that money been spent on testing statewide, we would have much better data on the extent of the problem and how to handle it. Instead, we are likely throwing good money after bad pursuing the myth that the practices that spread CWD in the Eradication Zone are unique, when these practices are widespread."

The Madison Capital Times has an interesting article running parallel to Stauber concerns about animal feed and feed supplements being a source of TSE & Chronic Wasting Disease. Supplemental feeding practices in Vermont township were a possible gateway to the disease and if the theory is borne out, many areas across the state and nation will be at similar risk.

After listening to representatives of the Wisconsin Commercial Deer and Elk Farmers Association defend their position against mandatory testing, defend their membership as a potential entry point for the disease, and then applaud the DNR's extermination/eradication effort, I was struck by an interesting coincidence. All the groups with some culpability for the disease entering Wisconsin are rallying around this idea of "lets come together on this eradication plan and stamp it out in Mt. Horeb." The DNR is culpable for allowing massive deer overpopulation which is a formula for the spread of all sorts of disease. The State Dept of Agriculture is culpable for failing to require adequate CWD testing of private game farms and preserves. The USDA is culpable for sweeping CWD under the rug when they have known about it for years. The Quality Deer Management Association is culpable for their supplemental deer feeding programs which may have been the source of CWD via infected feed. The Game Farm Associations are culpable for resisting mandatory CWD testing procedures that could have prevented an infected animal from being imported into the state.

All these groups are united in one set of related ideas. They don't want to talk about the "cause" of CWD; they want to buy the idea it is only in one place; and they want to kill it in this one place and make it go away.

--Ross Reinhold, Report from Ground Zero in the Hot Zone

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