The link is not 100% but two hunters eating from the same deer population and falling ill at around the same time is extremely unlikely to be a coincidence.
We are essentially one mutation away from this spreading between humans and that would be very, very bad.
It’s a prion, aka a protein which has gone wrong
The worst part about CWD is that it can sit in soil for a decade so once an area gets CWD, it will pretty much keep CWD