Redwood Reader

Tom Stienestra (San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2005 reported on the state monitoring efforts for Chronic Wasting Disease, a spongiform encephaly disease found in the U. S. in deer and elk herds. It is similar to so-called mad cow disease. This has been a growing problem, notably Wisconsin, for several years. Infected animals have been found in nine states so far, California not one of them.
The monitoring consists of urging hunters from Zones X (Northern California east of the Sierra Crest) and C (Northern California east of I-5) to bring their animals in for free testing at selected sites during hunting season several weeks ago. (October 1 and 2).
This is part of a national effort to control the disease. Wisconsin has ahd 471 positives out of 75,000 tested in the last three years. This year New York and West Virginia were added to the roll of states with infected animals.
The article finishes describing CWD as a neurological disease with unknown means of transmission. Deer lose weight “then deteriorate with tremors, disorientation and difficulty swallowing.” However, without really doing any extra work, we know from the PBS series Nova’s episode “The Brain Eater”, several very troubling threads are spun together here. One is the occurrence of spongiform encephaly across species barriers. Most diseases do not easily infect other species of animals with the same level of virulence but spongiform encephaly has epread it over seven hundred species in the mammals. This is the great danger of the avian flu, because humans, diseased birds and host vectors like bats and civets are all incubators of more virulent strains of these diseases.
Virulence can be multiplied by repeated thinning with antibiotics, each generation multiplying the number of surviving pathogens. Thus SIV, usually innocuous in man, was made far more powerful by repeated use of syringes during polio vaccinations in Africa until HIV resulted. As with avian flu and West Nile virus we see a majority of carriers unaware, a small percentage with minor symptoms and a very few with disastrous consequences.
The cause of the disease is a new vector called a prion, which is essentially a misfolded normal protein, which cause plaque lined holes in the brain, thus spongiform. Mad cow was shown to have originated in feed supplements for cattle, particularly bone meal. It was thought infected cows had been ground up and passed along. Now it turns out the source may have been human bones collected by fertilizer salesmen downstream of the Ganges, known for Hindu burials. This would turn the original source back to humans, as with the original East African disease Kuru, which was shown to be spread by ritual cannibalism.
As for the state monitoring efforts, we would think testing would be either mandatory or free, especially for deer which is usually hunted for the freezer, but that a better sampling might be made from roadkills, extending the season and the range of sampling.
California has had a lot of West Nile this year but nationally numbers are way down. Sometimes invasive species run into more trouble than first expected. Sometimes it takes native conditions several years to weed out threatening newcomers. Repeated drought will kill any plants not accustomed to it, for example, even if they thrive initially under favorable conditions, or before natives recognize a new food source. Still, as third largest biomass by species, humans can expect a lot of life forms to see us as food, and derive newer and better ways of getting at it.
The history of our species lies not only in our genes but in our immune system. Generations of resistance to specific diseases that protected the survivors of those diseases and epidemics have made an increasingly powerful human immunity to many microbes. There is evidence of epidemic that thinned the human population to perhaps a few hundred about 80,000 years ago. It was part of the Eve story, of a survivor memorialized in mitochondria DNA.
Further down in the article it is reported trapper Dick Seever and his crew had reduced the pig population at Henry Coe State Park. The stated reason is to allow oak seedlings to reach maturity to provide acorns as food for “hundreds of other species of wildlife and birds.” I think the number given of California wildlife as acorn dependant was about seventy in the Oaks and Folks publication of the Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program. I personally have been trying to figure out how and when white oaks regenerate- I haven’t seen a sapling on my place in twenty plus years, and I have no pigs or sign of deer browse. Smoke may be a critical germination factor for some species, as reported earlier in the year and noted in this blog. Even so, bigger predators keeping them moving may be a better answer than repeated thinning hunts.
California reservoirs are in good shape this year: “Lake Oroville, 45 percent full a year ago at this time, is 82 percent full. Others in great shape: Whiskeytown (99 percent full), Pardee (98 percent), Tulloch (92) and Englebright (92).
Other major lake numbers: Shasta (67 percent full, 108 percent of normal), Trinity (78 percent full, 110 percent of normal), Bullards Bar (74 percent full, 119 percent of normal), Folsom (68 percent full, 116 percent of normal), Camanche (74 percent full, 117 percent of normal) and New Melones (80 percent full, 147 percent of normal)” Some slight rain has come in already this fall, and my creek has had water in it all year for the first time since around 1987 or so. We hope others are seeing similar effects this year, and that a wetter pattern allows regeneration of the landscapes water storage system and accelerates the accumulation of glomalin.
One last California resource note in the article mentioned closure of the commercial cabezon season as limits have been reached. Then he tells us “cabezon is the one of the sweetest-tasting inshore coastal rockfish.”