Jim...this is not new at all. It is a form of TSE (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy). The beginnings were in the mid 1700's...long before people wanted to stop hunting. From one source I found on it's beginnings "...a discussion took place in the British Parliament in 1755 about the economic effects of a fatal and spreading disease in sheep, and the need for government to do something about it." That disease, of course, was scrapie.
In 1959, this endemic disease of sheep, unknown or ignored by medical science, was proposed by an American veterinarian to be analogous to a newly described disease of humans, called kuru, an epidemic neurological disorder found only in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In 1963, experiments to detect an infectious agent in kuru succeeded in transmitting disease to chimpanzees after incubation periods of 18-20 months. In the meantime, a neuropathological study of kuru had suggested a resemblance to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), first described in the early 1920’s by two German neurologists whose names comprise its eponym. CJD was therefore also inoculated into chimpanzees, and transmitted disease within 12-14 months."
Mad Cow is the same thing in cattle. In 1996, with the recognition in British young people of a “new variant” of CJD (nvCJD) that has since been traced to the consumption of tissue from cattle infected with spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), they having in turn consumed meat and bone meal nutritional supplements contaminated with scrapie-infected rendered sheep carcasses.
Sheep to cows to people. Hardly a stretch of deer to people transmission.
