By Jim Robbins for KFF Health News.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the KFF Health News-Public News Service Collaboration
Each fall, millions of hunters across North America make their way into forests and grasslands to kill deer. Over the winter, people chow down on the venison steaks, sausage, and burgers made from the animals.
These hunters, however, are not just on the front lines of an American tradition. Infectious disease researchers say they are also on the front lines of what could be a serious threat to public health: chronic wasting disease.
The neurological disease, which is contagious, rapidly spreading, and always fatal, is caused by misfolded proteins called prions. It currently is known to infect only members of the cervid family — elk, deer, reindeer, caribou, and moose.
Animal disease scientists are alarmed about the rapid spread of CWD in deer. Recent research shows that the barrier to a spillover into humans is less formidable than previously believed and that the prions causing the disease may be evolving to become more able to infect humans.
A response to the threat is ramping up. In 2023, a coalition of researchers began “working on a major initiative, bringing together 68 different global experts on various aspects of CWD to really look at what are the challenges ahead should we see a spillover into humans and food production,” said Michael Osterholm, an expert in infectious disease at the University of Minnesota and a leading authority on CWD.
“The bottom-line message is we are quite unprepared,” Osterholm said. “If we saw a spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans for what to do or how to follow up.”
The team of experts is planning for a potential outbreak, focusing on public health surveillance, lab capacity, prion disease diagnostics, surveillance of livestock and wildlife, risk communication, and education and outreach.
Despite the concern, tens of thousands of infected animals have been eaten by people in recent years, yet there have been no known human cases of the disease.
Many hunters have wrestled with how seriously to take the threat of CWD. “The predominant opinion I encounter is that no human being has gotten this disease,” said Steve Rinella, a writer and the founder of MeatEater, a media and lifestyle company focused on hunting and cooking wild game.
They think, “I am not going to worry about it because it hasn’t jumped the species barrier,” Rinella said. “That would change dramatically if a hunter got CWD.”
Other prion diseases, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, have affected humans. Mad cow claimed the lives of more than 200 people, mostly in the United Kingdom and France. Some experts believe Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s also may be caused by prions.
First discovered in Colorado in captive deer in 1967, CWD has since spread widely. It has been found in animals in at least 32 states, four Canadian provinces, and four other foreign countries. It was recently found for the first time in Yellowstone National Park.
Prions behave very differently than viruses and bacteria and are virtually impossible to eradicate. Matthew Dunfee, director of the Chronic Wasting Disease Alliance, said experts call it a “disease from outer space.”
Symptoms are gruesome. The brain deteriorates to a spongy consistency. Sometimes nicknamed “zombie deer disease,” the condition makes infected animals stumble, drool, and stare blankly before they die. There is no treatment or vaccine. And it is extremely difficult to eradicate, whether with disinfectants or with high heat — it even survives autoclaving, or medical sterilization.
Cooking doesn’t kill prions, said Osterholm. Unfortunately, he said, “cooking concentrates the prions. It makes it even more likely” people will consume them, he said.
Though CWD is not known to have passed to humans or domestic animals, experts are very concerned about both possibilities, which Osterholm’s group just received more than $1.5 million in funding to study. CWD can infect more parts of an animal’s body than other prion diseases like mad cow, which could make it more likely to spread to people who eat venison — if it can jump to humans.
Researchers estimate that between 7,000 and 15,000 infected animals are unknowingly consumed by hunter families annually, a number that increases every year as the disease spreads across the continent. While testing of wild game for CWD is available, it’s cumbersome and the tests are not widely used in many places.
A major problem with determining whether CWD has affected humans is that it has a long latency. People who consume prions may not contract the resulting disease until many years later — so, if someone fell sick, there might not be an apparent connection to having eaten deer.
Prions are extremely persistent in the environment. They can remain in the ground for many years and even be taken up by plants.
Because the most likely route for spillover is through people who eat venison, quick testing of deer and other cervid carcasses is where prevention is focused. Right now, a hunter may drive a deer to a check station and have a lymph node sample sent to a lab. It can be a week or more before results come in, so most hunters skip it.
Montana, for example, is famous for its deer hunting. CWD was first detected in the wild there in 2017 and now has spread across much of the state. Despite warnings and free testing, Montana wildlife officials have not seen much concern among hunters. “We have not seen a decrease in deer hunting because of this,” said Brian Wakeling, game management bureau chief for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks. In 2022 Montana hunters killed nearly 88,000 deer. Just 5,941 samples were taken, and 253 of those tested positive.
Experts believe a rapid test would greatly increase the number of animals tested and help prevent spillover.
Because of the importance of deer to Indigenous people, several tribal nations in Minnesota are working with experts at the University of Minnesota to come up with ways to monitor and manage the disease. “The threat and potential for the spread of CWD on any of our three reservations has the ability to negatively impact Ojibwe culture and traditions of deer hunting providing venison for our membership,” said Doug McArthur, a tribal biologist for the White Earth Nation, in a statement announcing the program. (The other groups referenced are the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and Red Lake Band of Chippewa.) “Tribes must be ready with a plan to manage and mitigate the effects of CWD … to ensure that the time-honored and culturally significant practice of harvesting deer is maintained for future generations.”
Peter Larsen is an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Minnesota Center for Prion Research and Outreach. The center was formed to study numerous aspects of prions as part of the push to get ahead of possible spillover. “Our mission is to learn everything we can about not just CWD but other prionlike diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “We are studying the biology and ecology” of the misfolded protein, he said. “How do prions move within the environment? How can we help mitigate risk and improve animal health and welfare?”
Part of that mission is new technology to make testing faster and easier. Researchers have developed a way for hunters to do their own testing, though it can take weeks for results. There’s hope for, within the next two years, a test that will reduce the wait time to three to four hours.
“With all the doom and gloom around CWD, we have real solutions that can help us fight this disease in new ways,” said Larsen. “There’s some optimism.”
Jim Robbins wrote this story for KFF Health News.
Disclosure: KFF Health News contributes to our fund for reporting on Health Issues, Mental Health, Reproductive Health, and Social Justice. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
click here.
By Madelyn Beck for WyoFile and Rae Ellen Bichell for KFF Health News.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Wyoming News Service reporting for the KFF Health News-Public News Service Collaboration
William Lopez remembers clearly the day in June 2017 when he says he was asked to call the spouse of a college friend who had just died and ask for her eyes.
The spouse hadn’t responded to calls from other employees at the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank, he said. As Lopez recalled, his supervisor thought a friend’s personal number would have more success.
Lopez refused. “I went for a walk,” he said.
Even without Lopez’s help, the eye bank that procures corneas from deceased donors in Wyoming and Colorado eventually collected his friend’s corneas, Lopez said. Lopez, who had entered the field to help people, became increasingly disillusioned during his three years working with the eye bank, despite rising from a technician to the distribution manager, and ultimately quit.
Checking the “donor” box on a driver’s license application, people may picture their heart, kidneys, or other organs saving another person’s life should the worst happen.
They are less likely to consider that tissues — corneas, tendons, bone marrow, skin, bone — are also covered by that checked box. In fact, donated tissues are collected much more frequently than organs, and corneas are the most commonly transplanted body part in the U.S., with nearly 51,000 transplants last year, according to the Eye Bank Association of America.
Organ and tissue donations are guided by different rules, with less transparency and what critics identify as more self-policing in the tissue donation industry. In Wyoming and Colorado, where the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank estimates it collects eye tissue from about 2,500 deceased donors a year, that has contributed to a tense work environment resulting in damaged or wasted tissues due to accidents, four former eye bank employees say.
“I think there’s an urgent need for stricter oversight of the donation process in general, particularly for eye and tissue banks,” said Janell Lewis, who worked at the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank for 12 years, managing public relations and overseeing fundraising before she quit in February 2023.
John Lohmeier, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank, declined to be interviewed for this article. In a prepared statement, he said he couldn’t comment on personnel matters or specific incidents raised by the former employees.
But generally, he wrote, “there are internal procedures that have been in place and continue to be followed to investigate and/or report any incident that would impact health and safety concerns.”
Lewis, Lopez, and two other former eye bank employees recalled one or more of the following problems during their time at Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank:
- Removal of eye tissue from the wrong body
- Damage or destruction of corneas due to improper removal
- Removal of corneas from a donor with a high-risk family history that could endanger a transplant recipient
- Lack of transparency about whether errors were being reported to federal agencies
- Pressuring and bullying of technicians
- High turnover and brief training of low-paid and inexperienced technicians
The Windshield of the Eye
The cornea is considered the
windshield of the eye. It is a clear dome that protects the eye from contaminants, maintains fluid balance, and filters light. Recipients of cornea donations typically need transplants because of trauma, infection, or
other conditions that cause blindness or blurred or cloudy vision.
The Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank is one of about 60 eye banks operating in the U.S.,
which leads the world in corneal transplants. New technicians often arrive at the eye bank untrained, sometimes with only a high school diploma, to perform the grim job of removing corneas from recently deceased corpses for about the same wages many fast-food workers earn.
But what eye bank technicians may lack in education and training, they generally make up for with a strong belief in the mission, according to the former employees. They said they joined the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank because they wanted to help restore people’s sight.
The nonprofit employs about 70 people across Colorado and Wyoming, according to a
tax filing submitted in 2023. Those records also show a net income of less than $1 million and more than $16 million in assets. Lohmeier was paid about $142,000.
Organs vs. Tissue
Organ donations fall under the purview of the Health Resources and Services Administration, and
public data details performance and
financial transaction records of organ procurement groups. Tissue donation is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, as well as national industry groups, and tissue bank transactions, performance, and outcomes are not available to the public.
There’s no reason tissues and organs should be treated differently, said Robert Dickson, medical director for the Washtenaw County Tuberculosis Clinic in Michigan. A patient in his county died from a bone graft contaminated with tuberculosis just a couple of years after a contaminated bone graft
killed eight other patients.
He
compared the tissue regulatory environment to the Wild West and called it a major public health concern.
“It’s fundamentally no different from an organ transplant. You’re taking tissue from one deceased patient and putting it into a living recipient. But it is not regulated and not tested as rigorously,” he said.
Marc Pearce, president and CEO of the American Association of Tissue Banks, said such cases are very rare.
“We don’t believe that we’ve proven ourselves to be not capable of regulating ourselves,” he said.
FDA officials disagree that the tissue industry is largely self-regulated, pointing to
federal rules that require certain organizations to register with the agency and provide a list of human cells or tissues they recover, store, or distribute.
The rules set donor eligibility requirements, and the agency inspects tissue establishments, including eye banks, said spokesperson Carly Pflaum.
“The FDA has implemented a tiered risk-based approach for the regulation of human cell, tissue and cellular and tissue-based products,” Pflaum wrote.
KFF Health News and WyoFile months ago requested reports of adverse events associated with the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank, but the FDA has yet to provide them. FDA dashboards show the eye bank
has not issued a recall since 2017, and inspections since at least 2009
have not resulted in any official action.
The tissue industry is largely self-monitored and the performance of eye banks is tracked internally, whereas the federal government publishes
annual performance reports for organ procurement groups. Health care providers are not required to report to the FDA adverse events resulting from tissue transplants.
Organ transplant providers are required to report safety events in recipients within 72 hours to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which operates under contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That includes an organ going unused because it was delivered to the wrong location. They have 24 hours if, for example, the recipient gets an infection or disease that may have been from the new organ.
Other countries have public registries detailing the outcomes of corneal transplants, including Australia, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. A similar registry in the U.S. could help monitor outcomes for patients and identify adverse events from transplant procedures, eye doctors and researchers wrote in
the journal Ophthalmology Science.
Tissue bank industry groups are responsible for much of the oversight of their dues-paying members. Transplanting surgeons may report adverse reactions to the tissue bank, which generally then conducts a review and submits a report to the FDA and the Eye Bank Association of America or the American Association of Tissue Banks.
Nearly all eye banks in the U.S. are members of the Eye Bank Association of America, which inspects member banks at least every three years as part of its accreditation process, but such inspection reports aren’t publicly available. Safety is paramount, association president Kevin Corcoran said, and the association’s medical standards require eye banks to request patient outcome information from transplanting surgeons a few months after surgery.
“We want to make sure we don’t have an eye bank that is slipping in their performance or failing to recover tissue,” he said. He declined to comment on any individual eye bank’s performance or release quality or transplantation data, complaints filed, or investigations undertaken.
No investigations have resulted in corrective action, he said, in the 13 years he has been at the association. The Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank is an accredited member of the association.
Balancing Mission and Stress
Several of the former employees were hesitant to speak about the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank because they didn’t want to sully the reputation of an industry they believe is essential for improving people’s lives and honoring the wishes of the dead.
But they described a high-pressure environment that they said led to many of their colleagues leaving and errors that reduced the number of successful retrievals.
Mackenzie Urban started recovering corneas as a technician for the eye bank in 2019 after finishing her bachelor’s degree. She saw it as a temporary job as she applied for medical school. But within a year of recovering her first cornea, she said, enough employees had left that she became the senior recovery technician and was training others.
She used limes for the training, guiding her students on how to use a scalpel to remove the peel without nicking the fruit beneath. Success meant lifting the peel off the lime without any juice spilling out.
“If you’re stressed, you’re going to shake,” Urban said.
Outside factors can compound the challenges of performing the delicate procedure. Maybe the coroner had drawn fluid from beneath the cornea, making collection much trickier, she said. After a person has been dead for about 24 hours, the eyes tend to deflate to the point of uselessness, adding time pressure to collecting donations, Urban said.
Sometimes, Urban said, another technician would be working on a body simultaneously, so that the entire body was moving around while she was trying to do the delicate procedure.
Interactions with grieving families could be intense, too. Sometimes, families would hug her, thankful that something good would come of their loss. Other times, they were hostile, such as the time one relative of a potential donor told her to “Cut your own f****** eyes out, you b****,” she recalled.
Urban appreciates the work the eye bank performs and doesn’t regret her time there. She said she respected that “they had a real commitment to serving the community and keeping prices low.” (It’s illegal to sell human body parts for transplant, but companies get reimbursed varying amounts for the expenses of harvesting, preparing, and shipping tissues.)
But the workplace culture made it untenable for her, she said. For example, Urban said, she was reprimanded and told that she needed to “buck up or get out” because she declined to harvest corneas from a person who died from an unknown cause. The body was purple from the neck down, covered in oozing blisters and with opaque flecks in the eyes, Urban said.
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling
The Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank has international contracts and ships corneas to Japan and the U.K., among other destinations. It became the exclusive eye tissue provider for Ireland when that country stopped collecting corneas over fears of transmitting mad cow disease. That means anyone who has received
a cornea transplant in Ireland in the past two decades likely now sees thanks to a person who died in Colorado or Wyoming, according to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service.
Lohmeier, the eye bank CEO, said local needs are prioritized for donations, while international shipments help fulfill the eye bank’s mission and “ensure that all viable corneas are transplanted, giving the gift of restored sight.”
The U.S. is one of the few nations with a
cornea surplus. FDA inspection reports confirmed that the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank procures more tissue than its geographic area can use.
The demand for international orders contributed to the high-pressure environment, Lopez said.
Employee turnover and the stress of the job resulted in the collection of corneas of poor quality, Lewis said. Local hospitals inquired about why so many corneas weren’t being transplanted, she added.
The leading reason was recovery errors that damaged the tissue, Lewis said.
Lohmeier disagreed that there was a significant decline in corneas being placed. “We do not believe this description accurately reflects the state of corneal recovery and transplants,” he said.
Internal records showed that about half of recovered corneas in November 2022 had moderate to heavy stress. The Eye Bank Association of America does not have comparable national data. The closest figure it tracks is the proportion, among tissues that were prepared but not transplanted, that were unable to be transplanted because of damage during processing; in 2022, it was a quarter.
Ashi Moore, who used to lead the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank’s quality assurance department, said she once filed a report to the FDA after a donor’s eye tissues were removed despite a family history indicating a high risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The disease, which should have been disqualifying for donation purposes, is a fatal brain disorder that
can be transmitted through infected tissue.
The issue was caught before the corneas could be placed in someone else’s eyes, but it should never have gotten to the point that the corneas were removed from the body, Moore said.
At least once, a technician retrieved corneas from the wrong body, according to Moore and other former employees. (The FDA was unable to provide records to confirm that report by publication.) Moore said she should have been told about the case of mistaken identity immediately but said she wasn’t made aware of it until after the eye bank’s leaders handled the situation themselves.
She said she couldn’t find evidence that the eye bank had reported the error to the FDA. It was one of the major reasons she decided to leave the organization, though she had derived a strong sense of purpose from working at the eye bank, she said.
When Lewis resigned, officials at the nonprofit eye bank offered her $5,000 to sign a severance agreement with a nondisparagement provision. She declined.
Lewis said she would like to see states hold tissue recovery agencies to the same standards as other organizations that handle corpses, such as hospitals, coroners, and funeral homes. And if they fail to meet those standards, they need to be held accountable to build public trust, she said.
Lewis’ and Lopez’s negative experiences with the eye bank had another consequence. Each decided they no longer wanted to be an organ or tissue donor.
“After witnessing and experiencing so many issues, I no longer feel comfortable with the potential of my family having to go through that when the time comes,” Lewis said.
Madelyn Beck and Rae Ellen Bichell wrote this story for KFF Health News.
get more stories like this via email
Contact
