The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a warning to hunters, stating that deer with tuberculosis could transmit the bacteria to humans.
The warning originates from a notification the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services received about a 77-year-old man who was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis but wasn’t exposed to people or countries that had endemic tuberculosis.
There were, however, deer around the area he lived in Michigan that have TB.
“He had no history of travel to countries with endemic tuberculosis, no known exposure to persons with tuberculosis, and no history of consumption of unpasteurized milk. He resided in the northeastern Lower Peninsula of Michigan, which has a low incidence of human tuberculosis but does have an enzootic focus of M. bovis in free-ranging deer,” reads the study.
The study suggests that the man was exposed to TB-related bacteria during his hunting activities and as a result had his pulmonary disease infection reactivated.
The CDC report said that the man was a regular deer hunter and had been field-dressing deer in Michigan for 20 years. After lab tests, it was found that the man had been exposed to bacterium found in deer and other animals that can cause tuberculosis to humans.
TWRA Wildlife Veterinarian Dan Grove told Fox 17 that the advice given by CDC is good overall.
“The advice is sound in general” Grove says. “If it looks like there is an abscess in a piece of meat then you want to avoid it. You always want to be cautious handling meat until you cook it and take basic precautions like wearing gloves. Sometimes everything looks good but you might get into dressing the animal and see something.”
Grove said that the bacterium associated with TB is typically associated with cattle and then spreads to other populations. “When cattle from other states are transported across state lines, a TB test is administered,” Grove said.
According to Fox 17, only Michigan and Minnesota have been reported to have TB in the wildlife.
M. bovis is the cause of a small percentage of TB infections in the United States, according to the CDC.
“M. bovis causes a relatively small proportion, less than 2%, of the total number of cases of TB disease in the United States. This accounts for less than 230 TB cases per year in the United States. M. bovis transmission from cattle to people was once common in the United States. This has been greatly reduced by decades of disease control in cattle and by routine pasteurization of cow’s milk,” says the CDC.
