Scientists have expressed concerns about the spread of a sickness called “zombie deer disease,” NY Post reported. They’re afraid it might evolve and start infecting people.
Last year, researchers found the first case of this infection in Yellowstone National Park. A deer carcass was found in the Wyoming area of the park tested positive for the highly contagious disease. It has been officially called chronic wasting disease, or CWD.
Rapid spread and lethal effects of zombie deer disease raise concerns globally
This disease is showing up in deer, elk, and moose in 33 different states in the U.S. It has also been reported in parts of Canada, Norway, and South Korea.
CWD “damages portions of the brain and typically causes progressive loss of body condition, behavioral changes, excessive salivation and death,” according to the New York State Department of Health. The infection is said to be 100 percent fatal with no treatments or vaccines.
“The bottom-line message is we are quite unprepared,” Michael Osterholm, an expert in infectious disease at the University of Minnesota told KFF Health News in early Feb. “If we saw a spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans for what to do or how to follow up.”
Scientists believe the main way people might get the zombie deer disease is by eating meat from infected deer. Even though thousands of deer and elk with the sickness are eaten each year, there haven’t been confirmed cases of people getting sick from it. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t change in the future, the experts predict.
CWD happens because of misfolded proteins called prions. There’s another disease caused by prions that started in animals but can now infect humans.
Insights from research on mad cow disease and CWD transmission
Dr. Sabine Gilch, Ph.D., a researcher at Canada’s University of Calgary, recently explained how Mad Cow Disease, known officially as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), “jumped the transmission barrier from animals to humans.”
“During the BSE crisis, BSE was transmitted through contaminated meat or food products to humans and caused a new form of human prion disease, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,” she explained.
Although Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease doesn’t pass from one person to another through touching or breathing in infected air, scientists think that “zombie deer disease” might.
To check if this is possible, Gilch and her group injected CWD samples from infected deer into mice that had been modified to have features similar to humans.
Afterward, these mice ended up getting “zombie deer disease” and were discovered to release infectious prions in their feces. “The implication is that CWD in humans might be contagious and transmit from person to person,” Gilch warned.
