By all accounts, the feasts that Wayne Waterhouse threw at his cabin overlooking Wisconsin's Brule River were fabulous. Every fall, Waterhouse would serve the bounty of his most recent hunting trips--heaping dishes of moose, elk and deer. But in 1993 Waterhouse died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain disorder that can be triggered by mad-cow disease, and within six years, two of his fellow feastgoers had also died of rare brain disorders. Was the game they ate to blame? That's what Wisconsin health authorities--and now the Centers for Disease Control--want to know.
State investigators, who in mid-July were tipped off to the...