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2 hunters may have died of prion disease from eating contaminated deer meat, researchers say
Researchers have drawn a possible link between the deaths of two hunters in the last couple of years from a rare neurological condition. A report, authored by medical experts from the University of Texas at San Antonio and published earlier this month in the clinical journal Neurology, suggests the men contracted it by consuming venison from deer infected with chronic wasting disease, a degenerative illness not conclusively shown to be transmissible from animals to humans.
Both men hunted at the same lodge and consumed meat from the same deer population before each developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and died soon afterward, the report’s authors said. They did not give the lodge’s specific location. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is one of several prion diseases — uncommon neurodegenerative disorders affecting humans that are characterized by an abnormal folding of proteins in the brain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms broadly mimic those of dementia, although patients afflicted with Creutzfeldt-Jakob deteriorate much more quickly.
The new study centered around the initial death of a 72-year-old man in 2022 who “presented with rapid-onset confusion and aggression,” the authors said. That man apparently had a history of eating meat from a deer population known to be infected with chronic wasting disease. His friend, who had eaten venison from the same deer population, died later from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
The friend’s death came within a month of him developing symptoms typical of the illness, like seizures and agitation, according to the study, and a postmortem ultimately confirmed his diagnosis with a variant form of it called sCJDMM1. Authors said that finding may point to “a possible novel animal-to-human transmission of CWD,” although they acknowledged it did not definitely prove that consuming venison from a deer infected with chronic wasting disease eventually caused Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in any human being. But that possibility could not be definitively ruled out, either.
“Although causation remains unproven, this cluster emphasizes the need for further investigation into the potential risks of consuming CWD-infected deer and its implications for public health,” they said in the report. CBS News contacted the report’s lead author for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
Prion diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, can have long incubation periods but progress rapidly once symptoms start to present themselves and are always fatal. While they are not well understood, exposure to certain pathogens that then trigger the brain proteins to fold is believed to be the cause.
According to the Mayo Clinic, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is thought to emerge in four different ways: sporadically, the most common form, where someone develops the disease without a clear trigger; by inheriting certain genetic changes that cause prion proteins to develop; through contaminated medical instruments used during surgeries or other medical procedures, which is rare; and through consumption of contaminated beef, which is even rarer.
A variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has long been tied to eating beef from cattle infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is another prion disorder. The connection between the infections in cattle and humans who ate beef from those cattle gained international attention when it was recognized publicly by government health officials in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, following a string of disease outbreaks.
Even though chronic wasting disease falls, along with mad cow, under the umbrella of prion disorders affecting animals, experts have said no strong evidence exists to indicate that prions seen in chronic wasting disease can infect humans. Some big questions remain about the disease’s transmission across species though, and there have been a few experimental studies that suggest, at least, that chronic wasting disease is transmissible to primates. The CDC writes in a discussion about prion transmission that, however experimental, those studies “raise the concern that CWD may pose a risk to people and suggest that it is important to prevent human exposures to CWD.”
Chronic wasting disease has been reported in free-ranging deer, elk and moose in 32 states across the continental U.S. and four Canadian provinces, as well as in some farmed deer and elk, according to the CDC. The agency has noted that the overall occurrence of the disease nationwide is relatively low, but it can spread quickly through populations where it has been established, and, in the event that it is established, “the risk can remain for a long time in the environment.”
Several hundred deer have tested positive for the disease in Minnesota over the last 20 years or so, mainly in the southeastern part of the state, CBS Minnesota reported. Last year, experts said a captive deer in Wisconsin tested positive for the illness just a few months before officials in Yellowstone National Park announced they had detected the disease in a deer in that area for the first time.
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Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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