{"id":5955,"date":"2024-02-21T08:11:08","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T14:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=5955"},"modified":"2024-02-21T08:11:11","modified_gmt":"2024-02-21T14:11:11","slug":"deer-are-beta-testing-a-nightmare-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/02\/21\/deer-are-beta-testing-a-nightmare-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"Deer Are Beta-Testing a Nightmare Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2024\/02\/deer-chronic-wasting-disease-prions-spillover-people\/677307\/\">The Atlantic<\/a> Prion diseases are poorly understood, and this one is devastating. Scott Napper, a biochemist and vaccinologist at the University of Saskatchewan, can easily envision humanity\u2019s ultimate doomsday disease. The scourge would spread fast, but the progression of illness would be slow and subtle. With no immunity, treatments, or vaccines to halt its progress, the disease would eventually find just about every single one of us, spreading via all manner of body fluids. In time, it would kill everyone it infected. Even our food and drink would not be safe, because the infectious agent would be hardy enough to survive common disinfectants and the heat of cooking; it would be pervasive enough to infest our livestock and our crops. \u201cImagine if consuming a plant could cause a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disorder,\u201d Napper told me. \u201cAny food grown within North America would be potentially deadly to humans.\u201d This nightmare illness doesn\u2019t yet exist. But for inspiration, Napper needs to look only at the very real contagion in his own lab: chronic wasting disease (CWD), a highly lethal, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease that is devastating North America\u2019s deer, elk, and other cervids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the half century since it was\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.aphis.usda.gov\/aphis\/ourfocus\/wildlifedamage\/programs\/nwrc\/sa_spotlight\/accomplishments_chronic_wasting_disease\">discovered<\/a>\u00a0in a captive deer colony in Colorado, CWD has worked its way into\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.usgs.gov\/centers\/nwhc\/science\/expanding-distribution-chronic-wasting-disease\">more than 30 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces<\/a>, as well as South Korea and several countries in Europe. In some captive herds, the disease has been detected in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/21598099\/\">more than 90 percent<\/a>\u00a0of individuals; in the wild, Debbie McKenzie, a biologist at the University of Alberta, told me, \u201cwe have areas now where more than 50 percent of the bucks are infected.\u201d And CWD kills indiscriminately, gnawing away at deer\u2019s brains until the tissue is riddled with holes. \u201cThe disease is out of control,\u201d Dalia Abdelaziz, a biochemist at the University of Calgary, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2024\/02\/deer-chronic-wasting-disease-prions-spillover-people\/677307\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Atlantic Prion diseases are poorly understood, and this one is devastating. Scott Napper, a biochemist and vaccinologist at the University of Saskatchewan, can easily envision humanity\u2019s ultimate doomsday disease. The scourge would spread fast, but the progression of illness would be slow and subtle. With no immunity, treatments, or vaccines to halt its progress, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5956,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5955\/revisions\/5956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}