Wasting Disease:
Separating Myth and Reality

Wasting disease, while present in deer herds throughout North America, is not perilous to humans as often reported.

Most of us, unfortunately, get our information from the mass media; from so-called broadcast news in particular.

Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, there are some stories that just can’t be told in 12 second sound bites. What’s more, broadcasters will always look for the negative spin, because in their minds it makes a better story.

When Hank Gevedon’s high school industrial arts class built and raced cement canoes, that was a real accomplishment. Previously, only college level kids, in engineering schools, had done such a thing. You never saw that story on TV, though, because it wasn’t important enough. After all, news about teenagers doing something creative wasn’t worth sharing.

But, as I told Hank at the time, if we had drowned one of those kids, the TV reporters would have killed themselves getting there.

There’s another problem as well. Because most broadcasters tend to be liberal and urban, they know very little about the outdoors. As such, they’re almost sure to get it wrong if it’s a story dealing with the hunting and fishing; particularly hunting, because hunting involves guns, and the media, as a group, is automatically against guns because all they’re used for is shooting people. Very big on the constitution, those folks. Until it involves the second amendment.

Given all that, it’s no wonder one of the most common questions I’ve been asked this year is, “is it safe to eat venison.” Apparently, too many hunters have heard those half-baked reports about wasting disease, and are scared of eating deer meat as a result. Indeed, I’ve had avid hunters tell me that weren’t even going out this year, because the presence of chronic wasting disease meant the meat wasn’t safe to eat.

In a word: Nonsense. You can, as usual, count on the media to have 1. gotten it wrong, and 2. turned it into a scare story.

Here are the facts:

Chronic wasting disease is properly known as Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD). EHD is a virus transmitted by the bite of a midge (a small fly we usually call a gnat). Deer who contract it loose body mass, and waste away---thus the common name.

Chronic wasting disease occurs annually in the southeastern United States and other areas, but its distribution and severity varies widely. Although we see major outbreaks of this disease every five to seven years, last year was considered to be the worst outbreak in about 30 years.

Signs of the disease depend on the strength of the virus and length of infection in the particular animal. EHD causes fever, labored breathing and swelling of the head, neck, tongue and eyelids. Deer infected with chronic wasting disease may die within 72 hours, or may slowly deteriorate for months from lameness and starvation. Early in the cycle of the disease, animals may show little or no sigh of infection. Infected deer that survive for a longer period of time experience lameness, loss of appetite, and greatly reduced activity.

Wildlife biologists believe drought may be a contributing factor to chronic wasting disease, because it concentrates the deer around water, making them more accessible to the gnats. This would certainly help explain the record outbreak. After two to three years of drought conditions throughout the Southeast, deer were concentrated near any water source they could find.

Another aspect of that concentration is that it made the deer carcasses more visible to people. A dead deer or two in the woods is out of sight. Several carcasses by the shore of a pond is an appalling thing to see. People were, quite naturally, concerned.

Wasting disease can only be transmitted, by the gnats, from one infected live deer to another. It is not infectious to humans at all, and cannot be spread from the carcass of a deer.

Once cold weather comes in, spread of chronic wasting disease stops, because frost kills the midges. Thus, there were few new reports once hard-frosts started.

Even before that, however, wildlife biologists knew that the outbreak, while significant, was not affecting the deer herd overall. Certainly it wasn’t a big enough problem to impact hunting seasons or zones. For example, “the number of deer taken by archers during September,” says Tina Brunjes, big game coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources, “was about the same as the previous year---which itself was a record year for deer harvest during that month.”

To repeat: EHD – chronic wasting disease - is not infectious to humans. Eating the meat from healthy appearing deer poses no risk, even if the deer is infected.

Wildlife officials caution, however, that hunters should not consume animals that appear emaciated or weak prior to harvest, due to the risk of secondary infections. EHD can cause large abscesses to form in the body cavity, muscle tissue, or under the skin. These abscesses render the meat inedible.

Although wasting disease usually occurs in late summer and early fall, because of increased presence of the gnats, deer affected with the acute form of EHD can be found in winter. With bow seasons coming up in most states, and the increasing number of early muzzleloading seasons, hunters should be aware that they may still see weak or emaciated deer, and should not harvest any that do not appear healthy.