Chronic Wasting Disease Fueled By Sewage Sludge

Brain Diseases Linked By Prions

By Martha Rosenberg

It’s been over ten years since Wisconsin endured a kind of deer holocaust. The terminal deer and elk disease, chronic wasting disease (CWD), descended upon its deer population with such vengeance officials declared CWD eradication zones in which fauns and does would be killed before bucks.

Thousands of deer carcasses were stored in refrigerated trucks in La Crosse while their severed heads were tested for CWD. If the carcasses were disease-free they were safe to eat (really?); if not, they were too dangerous to even put in a landfill. Why? Because “prions” (which also cause mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Alzheimer’s disease in humans) are not inactivated by cooking, heat, autoclaves, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde, or radiation. They remain in the soil indefinitely. (They contaminate everything indefinitely.)

prion disease epidemic

Hunters in Wisconsin and other states were warned to wear surgical gloves when cutting up deer and to avoid exposing open cuts or sores on their hands. One hunter wrote the local paper after his buck tested positive for CWD — he was worried about the blood on his steering wheel and hunting clothes, which his wife handled.

There were also cross-contamination risks since deer processors do not usually sterilize their equipment after each deer. Food pantries in Wisconsin and their customers were warned about the risks and it became difficult to donate. (“If this meat is so safe why don’t you eat it?” the pantry patrons may have been thinking.)

land application sewage sludge




biosolids land application and disease


Like mad cow disease, widely believed to stem from the cost-cutting practice of feeding cows to cows, chronic wasting disease may also have man-made origins. In the mid-1960s, the Department of Wildlife ran a series of nutritional studies on wild deer and elk at the Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado and soon after the studies began, however, Foothills deer and elk began dying from a mysterious disease. The CWD in the deer may have been caused by sheep held at the same facility which had scrapie, say researchers. (There are a few theories about the way that the disease arrived at CSU and spread outward from there. They all involve mismanagement of a biohazard that they completely underestimated.)


chronic wasting disease caused by prions

Clearly using wildlife, which is held in trust by the state for the benefit of the public per the”Public Trust Doctrine”, to profiteer from hunters is unethical and harmful to animals. And despite DNR officials’ assurance, the spread of CWD may prove harmful to humans too.

Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative pubic health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health



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