Well, it finally might have occurred. The always fatal neurologic disease known as chronic wasting disease (CWD), which occurs in deer, elk, and moose, and is slowly spreading throughout the US and Canada, may have finally made the jump from deer to humans. This is very worrisome.
CWD is a prion disease similar to "mad cow disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease in humans. There is no vaccine, treatment, or cure for the disease.
In the recently published study, two friends, who hunted and consumed venison from an area known to have chronic wasting disease in the deer population - both died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in 2022. Doctors think this is might be a case of "cross-species prion transmission".
So far CWD has been detected in 33 states and several Canadian provinces, and so far nothing has been found to eliminate or slow down the spread of the disease. High heat, disinfection, radiation - these don't kill the CWD prions.
How is it spread? Scientists believe CWD prions spread between animals through body fluids (e.g., feces, saliva, blood, or urine), either through direct contact or indirectly through environmental contamination of soil, food or water. Once introduced into an area or farm, the CWD prion (protein) is contagious within deer and elk populations and spreads.
Once CWD gets into the soil, it stays there for years, and so animals can contract it even after infected deer and elk have died. Recent research found that plants uptake the prions, where it remains infectious.
From Medical Xpress: Consumption of contaminated venison suspected in cases of deer hunters with prion disease
A small team of medical workers and researchers in the U.S. has published a case study of two men, both deer hunters, who developed a rare prion disease. In their study, published in the journal Neurology, the group describes the symptoms of the two patients and how they died.
...continue reading "Has Deer Chronic Wasting Disease Occurred In Humans?"
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