Joe Rogan Wildlife Biologist On Deadly Deer Disease

Brian Richards your friend wildlife.

Biologist and well we’re gonna talk about a bunch of but one of the that I wanted to talk about is this scary disease that uh well when Ted Nugent was on the podcast he downplayed the consequences and effects of something called CWD or Disease Deer chronic Sea Star wasting disease which has made it onto your farm and you live in Wisconsin and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did the meat-eater television show and this is a new thing that this Disease Map chronic Deer Chronic wasting disease was just it decimates the deers health and kills them and the suspicion is that some of this at least comes from these high fence operations where people grow deer and treat them like instead of like a wild animal they treat them like a domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same pile of food and they share this disease is this all knack you’re it Brian well you just started out about an hour’s worth of coverage so yeah just a little bit I’m a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Health Center US Geological Survey up in Madison Wisconsin and so one of the that I spend a lot of.

Time on is Zombie Deer chronic Zombie Deer wasting disease I wouldn’t say that makes me necessarily an expert but I’ve gotten to know a lot of people that I would call experts over the years so I’ve gained a little bit of knowledge so don’t I mean your statements and we could start at number different yes this disease it essentially just will describe what it does to these animals and why it’s such a major concern it hasn’t jumped to humans yet that we’re aware that we’re aware of but it is possibility a very real possibility we can’t rule it out at this point in time science is unable to rule it out so okay that’s a great place why would we care about this thing called Disease Testing chronic Whitetail Deer wasting disease and I would argue in some other scientists of argue there’s two major reasons number one is the impacts of this disease on members of deer family themselves and the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWT could become a human health issue at some point down the road yes you kind of nailed those two with regard to deer are members of the deer family white-tailed deer New Mexico mule deer elk moose and most recent.

Leaves picked up reindeer in Norway of all places we could articulate reasons some rationale why you know this disease might be thought of as being important first we look at is would be geographic spread so you know CWD twenty years ago was thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted Geographic range in southeastern Wyoming adjacent north eastern Colorado and maybe a little spillover into Nebraska biologist wildlife disease specialist looked at this disease it was interesting we didn’t know much about it at that point in time but it seemed to be very isolated there what does it do to the kills deer right but how does it kill alright so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs so big long words transmissible means it can go from animal a tube animal be spongiform means looks like a sponge and encephalopathy means disease of the brain so you put it together and so this disease results holes in the brain resulting in Icd 9 progressive neurological degeneration followed by death okay it’s.

A it’s a death sentence and there’s no cure for it it’s all you can capture the deer and give them some sort of medication no cure for these diseases the suite of diseases come you know there’s members of the this Tse group of diseases in humans most familiar is one called creutzfeldt-jakob disease so it’s very similar to mad cow disease they’re in the same family jion’s read it it’s an interesting you know there’s a goes back and forth on whether it’s or prion stamp Reisner to receive a Nobel laureate for his work on these diseases coined the term pre hun and in his first publication describing these diseases he did a phonetic spelling and it’s prion so other researchers it’s especially you know some from across the pond say it’s got to be prion and the main reason that you know some of them I talk to about is that an irk Stan poisoner when he hears it called Brian oh so we’ll say prion yes I’ll say prion from on now this disease which people know as mad cow disease obviously is transmissible to humans and that’s one of the reasons.

Why people are very scared that this could potentially jump from deer into humans and correct me if I’m wrong but it also is making its way into the actual plants that these animals eat you’re correct on both accounts show with BSE mad cow disease that was an interesting disease where it resulted from in essence turning cows into cannibals we were which I like this in New Guinea right with kicks it with crits fell with its Krugman which is a human disease tse likely started when one individual developed creutzfeldt-jakob disease that individual died and as is the practice was the practice in the fur a tribe in Papua New Guinea they practiced ritualized cannibalism to honor the dead and to help release the spirits from you know deceased family members so they would feed upon the come upon the corpse important you know the bodies of their deceased so when one individual died of probably some variant of creutzfeldt-jakob disease then the causative agent the Lipid Rafts prion protein which is concentrated in the central nervous system and lymphatic systems of you know of disease patients this was fed back to.

Other members of the family and the extended family and so when they got sick died and fed it again so we saw that with kuru in the nineteen we was in 1960 or around there it was realized that this cannibalistic behavior was likely the result you know or the might be the cause of disease transmission cannibalism was outlawed and at that point in time he broke completely the disease transmission cycle so no more new cases of kuru but they had lingering cases with an extended Chicken Pox incubation period up to forty years later before kuru finally burned out of that population whoa so now with or mad cow disease we were doing exactly in essence the same thing not exactly the same thing but in essence so in an effort to maximize production and reduce the amount of waste when a butchered cattle we would take all awful offa al you know hide bones the parts that are inedible and we would render cook them at high temperature and typically you know high pressure as well and it turns into slurry a Low Carb high protein slurry you skim the fat off the top of that and then dehydrate the rest.

Of it and have you know kind of a meat and bone meal a Low Fat high protein supplement realizing that cattle grow faster and produce better when they’re went on a high higher protein diet it seemed reasonable to use waste material from cows to feed back to cows so at some point turning traffic did better turning clouds into candles yeah so at some point in time a cow developed a tsco prion disease whether it came from scrapey the TSE of sheep or arose on its own is unknown but that cow died it was rendered into meat and bone meal and this Carb Diet high protein feed was then fed out hundreds to thousands and correct me if I’m wrong for these prions they could survive up to more than a thousand degree temperature yes surviving is kind of a strange term Joe in it they’re not alive I’ll start with it’s a protein they can persist they cannot be inactivated so yeah it’s a good necessarily these prions are not necessarily a living thing like a disease or a virus or a bacteria well they’re disease-causing agent but they are incredibly unique they’re an ideological like a virus of bacteria or you know a parasite could be causing.

Disease but all these other genetic material they’re alive which allows them to change rapidly to evolve over time so the whole concept that you have a protein that all mammals produce in a normal form can be converted after production into a disease-associated form that has these radically different characteristics one that you mentioned was you know resistance to heat treatment a normal Amino Acid prion protein and we have billions of them circulating in our bodies right now have a specific purpose as cellular purpose we don’t know exactly what it is but it’s likely involved in some sort of intracellular communication it’s a string of around 250 amino acids so a relatively short protein it does whatever it’s does and then the body recycles breaks that chain of amino acids down into its component parts and recycles it turns out that Waste Products normal cellular Molecular Weight prion protein likely has a half-life of maybe four to six hours okay so you’re producing them relatively constantly then there’s the Rheumatoid Arthritis disease associated form and all Chronic Kidney disease associated prions start as the Water Vital normal cellular pria so they’re converted from.

One three-dimensional form to a different form okay and this different form has these radically different characteristics one is heat resistance now there is UV light resistance I mentioned that the Data Usage normal cellular Acid Sequence prion protein has a half-life of maybe four to six hours the Vitamin C disease associated ones can persist in the environment for years and potentially up to decades okay when you say persist in the environment you mean in like on the ground on leaves like how would they process yeah all of those Joe so if a deer well sheds Nucleic Acid infectious agent this Normal Function prion protein and so from the time of deer is infected it’s probably around two years before it develops clinical signs a disease goes downhill loses its fear of humans with dramatic weight loss all of those that Strep Throat incubation period you know it’s probably shedding Antigen Detection infectious agent for the vast majority that time period so it looks healthy but it’s able of transmitting disease we’d call that AOA typhoid mary syndrome the two deer we that were positive on our farm bucks two and a half-year-old bucks we’re we had them tested as you know for the last.

Several years we’ve been getting initially we got our only bucks tested and then the last three or four years we’ve gotten all the deer tested they were two and a half-year-old bucks perfectly looked Mega Greens perfectly healthy and these are the first ones that you that tested positive when we tested in excess of thirty five deer over the last well more than fifty during the Stomach Flu incubation period would they still test positive at some point they will at some point so they can be spreading Causes Salmonella infectious agents without testing positive yes oh so a it’s probably between three and six months out when we can test an animal test positive but it’s likely shedding Causes Aids infectious agent least at lower quantities prior to that point in time and then so it’s shedding Lyme Disease infectious agent it’s capable of transmitting disease okay belong before it looks clinically ill that’s one of the real challenges with this disease from a management standpoint they look Milk Formula perfectly healthy they act Toddler Goat perfectly healthy but they’re starting to have that Icd 10 progressive neurological degeneration that we can only see very.

Near the end of disease so correct me if I’m wrong but this seems like we could potentially be facing a ticking time bomb of many deer that are wandering around out there right now that looked totally normal that are spreading this stuff all over the place and they’re acting normally look Goat Milk perfectly healthy and then obviously with this multi-year Food Poisoning incubation period this could just cascade and I think we’ve seen evidence of that now started out you know we talked about being isolated disease it was picked up in Wisconsin at the end of 2001 as of today CWD is man up and picked up in 25 states in captive and/or free-ranging populations in whitetail deer South Dakota mule deer elk or moose two Canadian provinces in addition it was picked up in South Korea and that was a real interesting it was in captive elk and those elk still had Canadian ear tags enema so we pretty much know how CWD units those helped and swim across the Pacific Pond most recently it was picked up two years ago in free-ranging reindeer in Norway and subsequent to that it was picked up in a small handful like three or four moose and a Red Deer.

In Norway and a single moose in Finland it’s a real concern over in Norway with okay so reindeer are very gregarious you know white-tailed deer or caribou so you know caribou reindeer so not unusual to see meant herds hundreds of animals so very different than what we see with white-tailed deer Public Land mule deer elk or moose we don’t see those huge herds but with elk you can in the wintertime but anyway it’s thought that this gregarious behavior might really facilitate transmission in reindeer all right so when it was picked up in reindeer nor always said you know maybe we should do something it’s an interesting story and Norway’s got experience with scraping sheep and so they’d have a long history what a scrimping scrapey is the same as what’s the same family diseases in sheep it’s actually the first one that was described scraping we’ve known about since the early 1700s disease a domestic sheep and it’s called scrapey because of the behavior of these animals once they entered a clinical phase of disease display and they seem like they itch bad and so they’ll.

Go up to fence posts and other objects and they’ll literally rub their hide off of their body so that’s the name scraping and it’s the same 9 Code progressive neurological disorder followed by death and you think about it so as this disease creates vacuoles in the brain it’s killing off neurons and so without those neurons firing you fall into that progressive degeneration and yet at some point your body can no longer survive that’s what’s really spooky about how this thing kills so anyway to go back to Norway when they detected CW trying to keep this a little bit closer to us okay you’re very soft-spoken oh I can hear myself playing I know is that the problem is the recording sorry okay no worries so when they picked up CWD and reindeer in Norway the researchers over there had witnessed what we are lack of success on this side of the pond over the course of the last 20 years they took it very so they took kind of some harsh medicine they announced their plans that they were going to eliminate a herd unit they were gonna kill every reindeer in an entire herd unit in Norway the idea is.

To eliminate the host population it’s called stamping out and it works in a pen this is the first time had been done realistically in a free-ranging population all ideas we don’t have effective tools for management of disease they were very fearful what would happen if this spread throughout that reindeer population and throughout other reindeer herds and like Alaska they have multiple herds like last year I hunted caribou was Steve up in the 40-mile River area and but there were you know and so they’re very well localized as probably none but at least they have a range that they move through so and in Norway they have two or three different herds many more than that so I don’t know exactly how many you can isolate so the idea is before this gets be any worse before it gets any farther let’s take it out see oh they had a hunting season they allowed hunters to take many as they could which was a little over a thousand reindeer and then they came in with government agents but it’s our concern that the hunters could eat something with CWD and then catch it well that’s always a concern but we can talk about.

Him yeah let me finish this it was with Norway in it so they literally took the bull by the horns they decided to do what was very unpopular what we have not been able to do in North America they and so after the hunting season sharpshooter’s took an additional 1400 reindeer they killed every reindeer in this herd unit and they’re going to keep it foul allow no reindeer in there for a minimum of five years so it says every bit promise of being the first large-scale success dealing with this disease in a free-ranging herd pretty different than what we’ve been able to accomplish over here