Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards
Uploaded: 2018-08-08T22:22:50.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

five four three two one yeehaw and we're live my good friend Doug Duren hello
Douglas hello
Joe Rogan good to see you as always and Brian Richards your friend wildlife biologist
and well
we're going to talk about a bunch of things but one of the things that I wanted
to talk about is
this scary disease that well when Ted Nugent was on the podcast he downplayed
the consequences and
effects of something called CWD or chronic wasting disease which has made it
onto your farm and you
live in Wisconsin and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did
the meat eater
television show and this is a new thing that this chronic wasting disease was
just just it decimates
the deer's health and kills them and the suspicion is that some of this at
least comes from these high
fence operations where people grow deer and treat them like instead of like a
wild animal they treat
them like a domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same pile
of food and they
share this disease is this all correct and accurate Brian well you just started
out about an hour's worth
the conversation so yeah just a little bit I'm a wildlife biologist with the
National Wildlife Health
Center U.S. Geological Survey up in Madison Wisconsin and so one of the things
that I spend a lot of time on is
chronic wasting disease I wouldn't say that makes me necessarily an expert but
I've gotten to know a lot of people that I would call
experts over the years so I've gained a little bit of knowledge so I don't even
your statement there we could start
a number of different places yeah this disease um it essentially just will
describe what it does to these animals and why it's such a major concern it
hasn't jumped to humans yet that we're aware of that we're aware of but it is a
possibility a very real possibility we can't rule it out at this point in time
science is unable to rule it out so okay that's a great place to start why
would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease and I would argue
in some other
scientists have argued there's two major reasons number one is the impacts of
this disease
on members of the deer family themselves and the other is that we cannot rule
out the possibility of humans we can't rule it out of humans yet that we're
aware of that we're aware of but it is a possibility a very real possibility we
can't rule it out at this point in time science is unable to rule it out so
okay that's a great place to start why would we care about this thing called
chronic wasting disease and I would argue and some other scientists have argued
there's two major reasons number
number one is the impacts of this disease on members of the deer family
themselves and the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD
could become a human health issue at some point down the road okay so you kind
of nailed those two
with regard to deer or members of the deer family white tail deer mule deer elk
moose and most recently it's picked up in in reindeer in Norway of all places
we could articulate some reason some rationale why you know this disease might
be thought of as being important
first we look at is would be geographic spread so you know CWD 20 years ago was
thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted geographic range in
southeast
Wyoming adjacent north eastern Colorado and maybe a little spillover into
Nebraska wildlife biologist wildlife disease specialist looked at this disease
it was interesting we didn't know much about it at that point in time but it
seemed to be very isolated there what does it do to the deer it kills deer
right but how does it kill all right so this is a member of a family of
diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs so big long
long words transmissible means it can go from animal a to animal b spongiform
means looks like a sponge and encephalopathy means disease of the brain so you
put it together and so this disease results in holes in the brain resulting in
progressive neurological degeneration followed by death okay it's a it's a
death sentence and there's no cure for it it's not you can capture the deer and
give them some sort of medication no cure for these disease
diseases the suite of diseases the suede diseases you know there's there's
members of the TSE group of diseases in humans most familiar is one called Creutzfeldt-Jakob's
disease right so it's very similar to mad cow disease they're in the same
family so that comes from prions well I'd say prions you could say prions I don't
know how to say I just read it
that's an interesting you know there's a it goes back and forth on whether it's
prion or prion Stan Preussner who received a Nobel laureate for his work on
these diseases coined the termed prion and in his first publication describing
these diseases he has been
he did a phonetic spelling and it's prion and it's prion so other researchers
it's especially you know some from across the pond um
say it's got to be prion and the main reason that you know some of them I've
talked to about that is that it irks Stan Preussner when he hears it
for his work on these diseases coined the termed prion. And in his first
publication describing
these diseases, he did a phonetic spelling, and it's prion. So other
researchers, especially
some from across the pond, say it's got to be prion. And the main reason that
some of them I
talked to about that is that it irks Stan Preussner when he hears it called prion.
Oh, so we'll say prion. So I'll say prion from now on. Now, this disease, which
people know as
mad cow disease, obviously is transmissible to humans. And that's one of the
reasons why people
are very scared that this could potentially jump from deer into humans. And
correct me if I'm wrong,
but it also is making its way into the actual plants that these animals eat.
You're correct on both accounts. So with BSC, mad cow disease, that was an
interesting disease where
in essence, turning cows into cannibals, we were recycling. Which also exists
in New Guinea,
right? With cannibals, Jacob Kreutzfeldt. With Kuru, which is a human disease,
a TSE,
likely started when one individual developed Kreutzfeldt-Jakob's disease. That
individual died.
And as is a practice, was the practice in the Furay tribe in Papua New Guinea,
they practiced ritualized cannibalism to honor the dead and to help release the
spirits from, you know,
deceased family members. So they would feed upon the corpse and port, you know,
the bodies of their
deceased. So when one individual died of probably some variant of Kreutzfeldt-Jakob's
disease,
then the causative agent, the prion protein, which is concentrated in the
central nervous system
system and lymphatic systems of, you know, of disease patients, this was fed
back to other members of the
family and the extended family. And so when they got sick and died, fed it
again. So we saw that with
Kuru, in the 19, I believe it was in 1960 or around there, it was realized that
this cannibalistic behavior was
likely the result, you know, or the likely the cause of disease transmission.
Cannibalism was outlawed. And at that
point in time, he broke completely the disease transmission cycle. So no more
new cases of Kuru, but they had
lingering cases with an extended incubation period up to 40 years later before
Kuru
finally burned out of that population.
So now with with BSE or mad cow disease, we were doing exactly, in essence, the
same thing, not exactly the same thing,
but in essence. So in an effort to maximize production and reduce the amount of
waste, when they butchered cattle,
we would take all the awful, OFFAL, you know, the high, the bones, the parts
that are inedible, and we would render
them, cook them at high temperature, and typically, you know, high pressure as
well. And it turns into a slurry, a
high protein slurry. You skim the fat off the top of that, and then dehydrate
the rest of it. And you have, you know, kind of a
meat and bone meal, a high protein supplement, realizing that cattle grow
faster and produce better when they're on a higher protein diet,
it seemed reasonable to use waste material from cows to feed back to cows. So
at some point, turning cows into cannibals.
So at some point in time, a cow developed a TSC, a prion disease. Whether it
came from scrapie, the TSC of sheep, or a rose on its own is unknown.
But that cow died, it was rendered into meat and bone meal, and this high
protein feed was then fed out to hundreds to thousands.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but these prions, they could survive up to more
than a thousand degree temperature.
Yeah, surviving is kind of a strange term, Joe, in that they're not alive to
start with. It's a protein. They can persist. They cannot be inactivated. So
yeah, you'd have to cook pretty hot.
So it's not necessarily, these prions are not necessarily a living thing, like
a disease, or a virus, or a bacteria.
Well, they're a disease-causing agent, but they are incredibly unique. So they're
an etiologic agent, like a virus, a bacteria, or, you know, a parasite could be
causing disease.
But all these other things have genetic material. They're alive, which allows
them to change rapidly to evolve over time.
So the whole concept that you have a protein, a protein that all mammals
produce in a normal form, can be converted after production into a disease-associated
form that has these radically different characteristics.
One that you mentioned was, you know, resistance to heat treatment. A normal prion
protein, and we have billions of them circulating in our bodies right now, have
a specific purpose, a cellular purpose.
We don't know exactly what it is, but it's likely involved in some sort of intracellular
communication.
It's a string of around 250 amino acids, so a relatively short protein. It does
whatever it does, and then the body recycles, breaks that chain of amino acids
down into its component parts, and recycles it.
It turns out that normal cellular prion protein likely has a half-life of maybe
four to six hours, okay? So you're producing them relatively constantly.
Then there's the disease-associated form, and all disease-associated prions
start as the normal cellular prion, so they're converted from one three-dimensional
form to a different form, okay?
And this different form has these radically different characteristics. One is
heat resistance, and other is UV light resistance. I mentioned that the normal
cellular prion protein has a half-life of maybe four to six hours. The disease-associated
ones can persist in the environment for years and potentially up to decades,
okay?
And when you say persist in the environment, you mean in like on the ground, on
leaves, on like how would they persist?
Yeah, all of those things, Joe. So if a deer sheds infectious agent, this prion
protein, and so from the time a deer is infected, it's probably around two
years before it develops clinical signs of disease, goes downhill, loses its
fear of humans, dramatic weight loss, all of those things.
That incubation period, you know, it's probably shedding infectious agent for
the vast majority of that time period. So it looks healthy, but it's able of
transmitting disease. We call that, you know, a typhoid Mary syndrome.
The two deer that were positive on our farm, two bucks, two-and-a-half-year-old
bucks, we had them tested, as you know, for the last several years we've been
getting, initially we got our only bucks tested,
and then the last three or four years we've gotten all the deer tested. They
were two-and-a-half-year-old bucks, looked perfectly healthy.
And these are the first ones that you've tested that tested positive?
That tested positive, and we tested in excess of 35 deer over the last, well,
more than that, probably more like 50.
Now, during the incubation period, would they still test positive?
At some point, they will.
At some point?
Yeah.
So they could be spreading infectious agents without testing positive?
Yes.
Oh, fuck.
Absolutel