By Nicholas Regush

About six weeks ago, I wrote about how there was growing concern that Mad Deer Disease, similar to Mad Cow disease, could affect the human brain.

The term used most often to describe the affliction, other than Mad Deer Disease, is "Chronic Wasting Disease," or simply CWD.

CWD is said to affect elk, mule deer, whitetails and blacktails.

CWD got started in northeastern Colorado and now is said to have spread to Wisconsin, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Saskatchewan.

A headline in the Rocky Mountain News last week, stated: "Hunters spreading CWD?"

In other words, did they transport parts of the carcass when they shot a deer? And was the carcass infectious? A dumped carcass could infect other deer - that is the reasoning.

Now you may know that there are a group of neurological diseases known as "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies " (TSE) - and the famous one is, of course, bovine spongiform encephalopathy or Mad Cow Disease.

To add to the recent drama, the Rocky Mountain News also published a story about a hunter dying of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) and it is being thrown around that this might be due to an infected Mad Deer. It just may be that he developed CJD as a result of an entirely different process.

First of all, if you do a scan of media stories on Mad Deer or CWD, you,ll note that everyone simply assumes that the disease is a transmissible one.

Where in hell is the evidence for this?

Also, there is no research being done to investigate whether environmental conditions may have played a role in CWD. This is typical. Blame everything on some infectious agent.

One view that has been entertained by a minority of researchers is that low levels of copper in the soils have something to do with CWD. In one small study - very preliminary, mind you - by Michael McDonnell, a Nebraska Elk researcher, when supplemental copper was fed to elk with the disease, it stopped.

This requires detailed follow-up, but unfortunately it probably won,t happen.

First, there are scientists enamored of the prion theory. Prions, so-called abnormally formed protein which are said to be capable of becoming infectious and capable of damaging the brain, are assumed to be the cause of TSEs.

Second, there are a number of consumer groups which think it is cool to argue that the government isn,t doing enough to ward off the potential of Mad Cow-like disease in America. These consumer advocates should take a few weeks off from their various forms of advocacy and spend some time thinking about the possibility that they are off the mark and that environmental factors need to be explored.

But they won,t. They have too much invested in infectious TSEs.

Third, the media are really into the building of a panic button for CWD.

Great combination: Scientists looking for a new career niche, consumer advocates probably looking to write books and fancy reports about the new disease and media sycophants not doing any thinking.

What a mess! And it will get worse.