Deaths raise concern of link to deer disease

? The deaths of three outdoorsmen from brain-destroying illnesses are under investigation by medical experts who want to know whether chronic wasting disease has crossed from animals into humans, just as mad cow disease did in Europe.

The men knew one another and ate elk and deer meat at wild game feasts hosted by one of them in Wisconsin during the 1980s and ’90s. All three died in the 1990s.

Randy Marten, the son of Roger Marten, stands alongside some of his father's hunting trophies in Mondovi, Wis. Roger Marten died of a rare brain disease. There are concerns that the death of Roger Marten and two friends, James Botts and Wayne Waterhouse, may be linked to chronic wasting disease, which affects deer and elk.

Investigators want to know whether the deaths were just a coincidence or whether the men contracted their diseases from the meat of infected game.

There has never been a documented case of a person contracting a brain-destroying illness from eating wild animals with chronic wasting disease.

“We are not saying it absolutely can’t happen. We know that it’s a mistake to say that,” said Dr. Larry Schonberger, a specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “It gets a lot of people scared and it has economic consequences and everything, so we need to check it out.”

In February, chronic wasting disease an incurable, brain-destroying illness that causes deer, elk, moose and caribou to grow thin and die was found in Wisconsin deer, marking the first time it was discovered east of the Mississippi River. It was identified in Colorado elk more than three decades ago and is now known to exist in deer or elk in eight states and Canada; thousands of animals are now being slaughtered to contain it.

Chronic wasting disease is related to mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. All three diseases are caused by mutant proteins called prions that make spongelike holes in the brain.

During the 1990s, scientists confirmed that people in Europe developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob from eating beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease. The finding devastated Europe’s beef industry.

If elk and deer meat prove to be a similar threat, the effects would not be nearly as disastrous, in part because beef eating is far more widespread. But such a finding could raise fears of the disease spreading from wild animals to livestock and endangering the food supply.

The Wisconsin Division of Health and the CDC are looking at autopsy results and other records regarding James Botts, Wayne Waterhouse and Roger Marten. Waterhouse, of Chetek, Wis., and Marten, of Mondovi, Wis., both 66, died in 1993. Botts, 55, of Blaine, Minn., died in 1999. Waterhouse and Marten were avid hunters; Botts fished.

Waterhouse and Botts died of what was diagnosed as Creutzfeldt-Jakob, their families said. Creutzfeldt-Jakob is always fatal and occurs in just one in a million people. Marten died of Pick’s disease, a more common brain-destroying disorder, said his son, Randy.