Deer Disease Concerns — Now everyone is freaked out about deer meat. In fact this disease has been known about for decades.

The infectious prion protein that causes chronic wasting disease in deer and elk has spread across the country, and last year was identified in upstate New York. The scientists say that the finding should be a wake-up call to humans consuming or handling venison.

Chronic wasting is not unlike another infectious prion disease that crossed from cows into humans from contaminated beef. Mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, triggered a lethal disease called variant-Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, which has killed 170 people in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

The New York Times covered this story and I found this comment interesting:

Study Finds Wider Tainting of Deer Body From a Disease – New York Times
Meanwhile, epidemiologists have been looking for signs of brain wasting disease among deer and elk hunters, Dr. Bosque said. Hunters occasionally develop a human prion disease, called sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but not in abnormally high numbers. And even if people did contract chronic wasting disease from eating infected animal meat, it is not clear what the disease would look like, he said.

Oh really? Not know what it looks like? How about this?