#1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Five, four, three, two, one, yee-haw, and we're live. My good friend Doug Duren. Hello, Douglas.

Doug Duren (0:10)

Hello, Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

Good to see you as a whole.

Bryan Richards, your friend, a wildlife biologist. And well, we're gonna talk about a bunch of things, but one of the things that I wanted to talk about is this scary disease that, well, when Ted Nugent was on the podcast, he downplayed the consequences and effects of something called CWD, or Chronic Wasting Disease, which has made it onto your farm. And you live in Wisconsin, and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did the meat eater television show. And this is a new thing, that this chronic wasting disease, it decimates the deer's health and kills them. And the suspicion is that some of this, at least, comes from these high fence operations where people grow deer and treat them like, instead of like a wild animal, they treat them like a domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same pile of food and they share this disease. Is this all correct and accurate, Bryan?

Bryan Richards (1:16)

Well, you just started out about an hour's worth of conversation. So, yeah, just a little bit. I'm a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Health Center, US. Geological Survey up in Madison, Wisconsin. And so one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is chronic wasting disease.

I wouldn't say that makes me necessarily an expert, but I've gotten to know a lot of people that I would call experts over the years. So I've gained a little bit of knowledge.

So I don't even, your statement there, we could start at a number of different places.

Joe Rogan (1:48)

Yeah, this disease, it essentially, well, describe what it does to these animals and why it's such a major concern. It hasn't jumped to humans yet.

Bryan Richards (1:59)

That we're aware of.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

That we're aware of. But it is a possibility, a very real possibility.

Bryan Richards (2:03)

We can't rule it out at this point in time. Science is unable to rule it out. So, okay, that's a great place to start. Why would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease? And I would argue, and some other scientists have argued, there's two major reasons. Number one is the impacts of this disease on members of the deer family themselves. And the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD could become a human health issue at some point down the road. Okay, so you kind of nailed those two.

With regard to deer or members of the deer family, white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, moose, and most recently it was picked up in reindeer in Norway, of all places.

We could articulate some reason, some rationale why this disease might be thought of as being important. First we look at would be geographic spread. So CWD 20 years ago was thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted geographic range in southeastern Wyoming, adjacent north, eastern Colorado, and maybe a little spillover in Nebraska. Wildlife biologist, wildlife disease specialist looked at this disease. It was interesting. We didn't know much about it at that point in time, but it seemed to be very isolated there.

Joe Rogan (3:21)

What does it do to the deer?

Bryan Richards (3:22)

It kills deer.

Joe Rogan (3:24)

Right, but how does it kill them?

Bryan Richards (3:25)

All right, so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSEs.

So big long words. Transmissible means it can go from animal A to animal B. Spongiform means looks like a sponge, and encephalopathy means disease of the brain. So you put it together, and so this disease results in holes in the brain, resulting in progressive neurological degeneration, followed by death. Okay, it's a death sentence for a deer.

Joe Rogan (3:57)

And there's no cure for it. It's not like you can capture the deer and give them some sort of medication.

Bryan Richards (4:02)

No cure for these diseases. The suite of diseases, you know, there's members of this TSE group of diseases in humans.

Most familiar is one called Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease.

Joe Rogan (4:15)

So it's very similar to mad cow disease.

Bryan Richards (4:18)

They're in the same family.

Joe Rogan (4:19)

So it comes from prions?

Bryan Richards (4:21)

Well, I'd say prions. You could say prions.

Joe Rogan (4:23)

I don't know how to say it. I'll just read it.

Bryan Richards (4:24)

That's an interesting, you know, there's a, it goes back and forth on whether it's prion or prion. Stan Proisner, who received a Nobel laureate for his work on these diseases, coined the termed prion.