In Saskatchewan, we are doing a huge public health experiment with CWD.
If the total deer harvest is on the order of 30,000 deer, and last year 3300 animals were tested with 528 positive for CWD, it is obvious that a very large number of CWD positive animals are being consumed by hunter's families.
Assuming the CWD positive rate is reasonably constant, 4,800 deer in the harvest were actually positive for CWD, and unknowingly consumed.
I'm late to this party I know but might be a bit enlightening on the subject.
In 2002 I was working from a rural gravel pit SW of Innisfail, Ab. and had my RV & truck parked in a local land owners yard. One day he commented that he had never ridden in an 18 wheeler and would it be possible to spend the afternoon with me...you bet, company always welcome.
This turned out to be one of the most informative 'riders" I ever had along. It turned out he was a "just retired biologist" with AB. Natural Resources that had been working on the CWD file since it became a thing in AB.
I never checked his credentials or was given any reason to doubt his word...he talked a good, believable story so take it as it is, just some memories of that conversation.
He claimed that the bug that causes CWD is only present in the brain & spinal column fluid...there is no evidence of it ever migrating to the muscle meat in any effected animal ( remember this was back in 2002 so this may be old data) that he was aware of. He claimed he would have no issue eating deer meat that had never been in contact with brain tissue or spinal fluid... but the problem he said, is that customary butchering practices do not always prevent this from happening...spitting the animal down the backbone & cutting "bone-in chops" will always contain material from the spinal column. Boning out an animal is the only "fool-proof" way to keep from contaminating some otherwise safe meat. There have been a few Humans infected with the disease in its farm animal form in Europe and he claimed that altho unproven how they were infected, the research showed that they were infected by using neck & backbones from infected sheep to boil up a soup broth. In his tenure on the file, he claimed they had no evidence of plain meat ever infecting a person from farm or wild animals.
Another claim he made was that you cannot "cook" the infecting bug out of infected meat the way you can with other organisms...the "prions" are still there he claimed.
I have never had an animal checked for CWD since then and have eaten a pile of deer meat...but every ounce of it is boned from the frame without touching anything he talked about. Even an animal shot in the backbone would be very hard for me to consume without testing it first...hydraulic shock from a high speed bullet could infect a lot of meat that otherwise would look good for use...not me...
