NYT: Town's Venison Banquet Puts a State on Alert

Town's Venison Banquet Puts a State on Alert
By MICHELLE YORK

Published: April 10, 2005


VERONA, N.Y., April 7 - For years, David L. Smith cooked wild game for his Fire Department's annual fund-raising sportsmen banquet. It was his way to help out after he retired from the department's volunteer corps.

At this year's banquet, on March 13, more than 300 townsfolk sampled his dishes - the venison meatballs, chili and patties. Three weeks later, Mr. Smith was trying to forget the whole affair with a whiskey at the local V.F.W. "My wife said they'd come to get me," he said.

Through unlucky circumstance, tissue samples from a deer that one farmer donated for the banquet tested positive for chronic wasting disease, and the results were discovered after the meat had been eaten at the banquet. It is the deer version of mad cow disease, and the first documented case in New York.

Though people have become ill with mad cow disease from eating infected beef, no human is known to have become ill by eating infected venison. No one has even remotely blamed Mr. Smith. But his trepidation and dejection about the disease seemed to be felt throughout this rural area some 250 miles northwest of Manhattan, where deer hunting is part of the culture. "It's scary to a lot of people," said the V.F.W.'s bartender, Diana Dodge.

Since the disease was found, agriculture, health and environmental workers have been trying to find out how it came here and how many of the state's 10,000 deer might be infected....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/nyregion/10deer.html

While I can see why this would be worrisome, if chronic wasting disease is like mad cow, it's mainly brain and spinal cord tissue that causes the problem. Eating lean muscle meat (ie, venison steak) is not believed to transmit mad cow.

As for those venison meatballs, if they used meat scraped off the bone, there could be a risk, but only if this is transmissible to humans, which it's not believed to be.