• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    For years, chronic wasting disease (CWD), caused by prions – abnormal, transmissible pathogenic agents – has been spreading stealthily across North America, with concerns voiced primarily by hunters after spotting deer behaving strangely.

    The prions cause changes in the hosts’ brains and nervous systems, leaving animals drooling, lethargic, emaciated, stumbling and with a telltale “blank stare” that led some to call it “zombie deer disease”.

    Its discovery in Yellowstone, whose ecosystem supports the greatest and most diverse array of large wild mammals in the continental US, represents an important public wake-up call, says Dr Thomas Roffe, a vet and former chief of animal health for the Fish & Wildlife Service, a US federal agency.

    Roffe had been predicting CWD would reach Yellowstone for decades, warning that both the federal government and the state of Wyoming needed to take aggressive measures to help slow its spread.

    “The BSE [mad cow] outbreak in Britain provided an example of how, overnight, things can get crazy when a spillover event happens from, say, livestock to people,” Anderson says.

    Dr Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Cornell University, says CWD should be viewed against a backdrop of dangerous emerging zoonotic pathogens that are moving back and forth across species barriers between humans, livestock and wildlife globally.


    Saved 82% of original text.

      • Devi@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        The deer disease is the same family as BSE which does jump to humans, so it’s fairly likely.

        • Hazzia@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          But it’s only transmissible via consumption like mad cow disease, is that correct? If so, at the very least it shouldn’t become an epidemic, just very bad for the environment and deer jerky enthusiasts.

          Edit: Nope, nvmd, I’m dumb. They said it’s really contagious and these prions can persist a long fucking time on surfaces. I’m gonna just never go outside again, thanks, I ain’t fucking with no prion disease.

          • Devi@beehaw.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s tricky. So I was listening to a BSE radio doc recently which had an episode about the deer. They actually don’t know if BSE was transmitted through eating the beef, in fact there’s cases of vegetarians getting it. It’s still being studied. They’re very worried about people eating infected deer, which is quite likely being as they’re easy to kill, but also having anything to do with them because they just don’t know how it moves from animal to animal, deers rarely eat each other so it’s not super likely that’s the only way.