The MN Outdoor news published this letter in January 2019. It was motivated by the comments of Mike Foy (formerly of the WI DNR).

Here's something many people don't know about viruses (like chickenpox or the cold your doctor won't prescribe antibiotics for). Your body doesn't always eliminate the virus from your body. In a "normal" infection your body learns to recognize the virus (via antibodies) and works to control the virus by destroying it whenever it is found. However, some viruses have the ability to modify your cells' DNA and stay hidden in the background, ready to spring back up if your immune system stops paying attention.

Here is an example: Chickenpox and Shingles are caused by the same varicella-zoster virus, and the second infection (Shingles) occurs when an older adult's immune system is weakened and has trouble controlling the latent pest that's been hiding out since childhood!

This story is relevant to chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer that has been spreading through Wisconsin and is slowing being uncovered in the 300-zone. CWD is caused by a tiny molecule, a prion, that deer spread by saliva, urine, feces, and carcass. In the natural environment, prions are nearly indestructible - in part because they're so tiny and simple. If a prion is the size of a can of soup, a virus is the size of a school bus, and an e coli bacteria is the size of all of the people in Minneapolis (combined!). One reason bacteria are (comparatively) easy to remove via cleaning agents is that on the cleaning agent scale, they're incredible large and delicate objects. Once prions are in the soil around a salt lick or bait pile, absent gallons of bleach and a pressure cooker, they'll always be there, hiding in the background, ready to infect a passing deer just like the chickenpox hiding out in my DNA.

Nature is a generally a better problem solver than we are, and in thinking about CWD we would be wise to consider nature's approach to infections. In the same way that your body actively controls an infection, because it is sometimes impossible to eliminate the infectious agent, the legislature should institute a bounty, say $5000, for each CWD positive deer a hunter finds. Hunters and other people with guns would then act as immune system agents for the state's deer herd and the infection would have some hope of being controlled until a vaccine can be developed.

$5000 per deer seems like a lot, but what if there are 100 total cwd positive deer in Minnesota? (there have been only 15 positives since July). How seriously would people try to harvest a CWD deer if the bag limits were the same and the purse was that big? The cost of the bounty is orders of magnitude below the economic value (~$1.3B) hunting brings to the state.