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Robert Cohen, author of Milk the Deadly Poison (click here to purchase) presents some sobering thoughts on the dangers of hunting in addition to heart attacks brought on by exertion or the excitement of killing, careless gun-handling, shooting accidents, and falling out of tree stands.

In "Thinning Out the Herd, an open letter to the hunters of America", he warns of other dangers to be aware of when consuming the flesh of slaughtered  deer.  Reproduced below is the mostg pertinent portion of his open letter:

Got filaria?

There is a very tiny worm that grows in mammalian hearts. Filaria are also known as heart worms. Their larvae are microscopic, and your venison flesh may very well contain the seed of your and your child's premature deaths.

The worm resides in the chambers of your heart and loves atrial fibers.
You dine, you die.

Recently, there have been tales of a new disease that turns the human brain into a sponge. It's called spongiform encephalopathy. The scientific name is Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, (CJD) and deer shot by hunters are now testing positive for this debilitating brain disease.

The incubation period of CJD can be up to thirty years. Once you get it, there is no getting rid of it. The deer you shoot today may very well contain the protein particle (PRION) that acts like a ticking time bomb within the multi-layered folds of your cerebral cortex…..

Lyme disease and deer ticks are a walk in the park compared to "mad-deer disease."….. How good will that venison taste when you and your family know that the next bite might be deadly?  (END of excerpt)

Robert Cohen's  website is  http://www.notmilk.com

Three people, two deer-hunters and one woman who ate venison have been diagnosed with invariably fatal Creuzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).  There may well be more victims because the symptoms are the same as those of Alzheimer's disease.  The distinction can not be made until an autopsy is performed after death. 

CJD is a transmissible encephalopathy (TSE) one form of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also know as "mad cow" disease, which broke out in England and is now (December 2000) spreading to other countries in Europe.  Many schools have dropped beef from the menus.  Beef sales in France fell by 60%.  The disease people get from eating beef is known as a new variant CJD (vCJD).  The disease has also broken out in Kentucky squirrels.  As of April 1988, 11 people who had eaten squirrel brains, a Kentucky specialty, had contracted CJD.  TSE has also been detected in elk and mink.

The point of all this is that flesh from wild animals may not be safer than flesh from domestically-raised animals with respect to TSE and its human form CJD,

TSE has also been identified in pigs, sheep, goats, mink, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, domestic cats, puma, cheetah, eland, kudu, Arabian oryx, myland, marmosets, macaques, chimpanzees and ostriches.

We are reassured that only one person in a million will contract CJD, which has been the case for as long as records exist, and would put the number of cases in the US at 250 at any given time.  A Yale University study found, however, that as many as 13% of Alzheimer patients actually die of Alzheimer's disease. (Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders, Vol 3 Nos 1-2 1989)  Another study in Neurology (January 1989) put the figure at 5.5% .  If even 1% of the 2 million Americans diagnosed as having Alzheimer's turned out to be afflicted with CJD, this would mean 20,000, not 250, cases of CJD in the US annually.  (Credit to Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly Nos 606-607 July 16,1998 for facts in this last paragraph)

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