A case report published June 12, 2026 in Frontiers in Public Health documents laboratory-confirmed sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in a 72 year old lifelong hunter with decades of deer and elk exposure in a chronic wasting disease (CWD) endemic part of Louisiana, and describes the epidemiologic investigation opened after a hunting companion from the same lodge developed a similar illness. Cerebrospinal fluid testing (RT-QuIC, total tau, 14-3-3 protein) and postmortem neuropathology confirmed sporadic CJD, MM1 subtype, according to the report by Kotkowski and colleagues. The authors write plainly that no evidence supporting confirmed CWD-to-human transmission was identified, even as the clustering of illness within a shared exposure network prompted a structured public health review.
The case is not new to the medical literature. A companion illness in the same lodge was first described in an abstract presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 2024 meeting, titled "Two Hunters from the Same Lodge Afflicted with Sporadic CJD: Is Chronic Wasting Disease to Blame?" That earlier report described a friend of the current patient who had also eaten venison from the same deer population and had recently died of CJD. The newly published paper is the fuller, peer-reviewed account of the surviving hunter's clinical course, adding the neuroimaging, cerebrospinal fluid, and neuropathology detail that a conference abstract could not carry.
CJD occurs sporadically in about one to two people per million each year worldwide, with no known exposure cause in the great majority of cases. The authors note that the patient's hospitalization was complicated by posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, a separate condition that made some of his brain scans harder to interpret, a detail the report flags as a diagnostic complication rather than a finding related to venison exposure. CWD, a prion disease of deer, elk and other cervids, has never been shown to cause illness in a person; the report describes an investigation prompted by proximity and shared exposure, not a demonstrated case of animal-to-human transmission.
Public health authorities who reviewed the cluster did so under long-standing surveillance protocols for suspected prion disease clusters, the same protocols cited in the earlier macaque tissue findings this newspaper has reported on. The authors frame the case as an argument for continued vigilance and reporting, not as evidence that venison consumption caused either hunter's illness.