Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier

Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier

When the mule deer buck died in October, it perished in a place most humans would consider the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road. But its last breaths were not taken in an isolated corner of American geography. It succumbed to a long-dreaded disease in the backcountry of Yellowstone national park, north-west Wyoming – the first confirmed case of chronic wasting disease in the country’s most famous nature reserve.

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”. It spreads through the cervid family: deer, elk, moose, caribou and reindeer. It is fatal, with no known treatments or vaccines.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•6 months ago

          I’m old enough to recognize that death is often unpleasant. All I ask is that it be quick, in the sense that I don’t linger very long when the time comes.

          This is the opposite of how I’d want to go.

  • @[email protected]English
    54•6 months ago

    5 years or so ago I would be WTFing at this headline and sending the article to everyone. Now my reaction is just ‘Yeah sure why the fuck not.’

    • roguetrick
      17•6 months ago

      Oh this has been cooking for much more than 5 years and really has been quite prevalent since the aughts. With deer’s proclivity to scavenging the bodies and gut piles that hunters leave of other deer, as well as the fact that carrion birds that eat the corpses will let the prions spread right through their digestive system into the environment, its spread is inevitable.

  • MamboGatorEnglish
    51•6 months ago

    My dad is a contractor for a major beef processor in North America and tells me frequently how this is a much bigger issue and wider spread than anyone wants to admit. He has been told that a lot of the early-onset dementia cases the world has seen are likely linked to CWD. If an infected deer pees on the grass and another animal eats it, it can potentially spread the disease.

    • MamboGatorEnglish
      48•6 months ago

      Yes, I realize this has major “my dad works at Nintendo” vibes but with much darker connotations.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•6 months ago

      No one in the beef industry is an expert on dementia. This is standard “I heard it from a guy” gossip.

  • @[email protected]English
    46•6 months ago

    Once an environment is infected, the pathogen is extremely hard to eradicate. It can persist for years in dirt or on surfaces, and scientists report it is resistant to disinfectants, formaldehyde, radiation and incineration at 600C (1,100F).

    • @[email protected]English
      24•6 months ago

      This has me wondering, what happens to prions in the environment, ultimately? Presumably they’re nothing new, so if they’re that hard to destroy, shouldn’t they just have been building up in the environment ever since the first ones formed? Does something eat them, somehow?

        • @LetKCater2UEnglish
          12•6 months ago

          I’m gonna stop eating all together just to be safe.

          • AlysonFaithGames
            5•6 months ago

            Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease can happen spontaneously, meaning one of your prions becomes misfolded. It can also be genetic or caught due to medical equipment that hasn’t been properly cleaned or from using human tissue from cadavers (iatrogenic). There’s even been a case of variant CJD from packed red blood cells.

            Have a merry Christmas!

            • @LetKCater2UEnglish
              2•4 months ago

              I’m gonna stop eating existing all together just to be safe.

        • @[email protected]English
          5•6 months ago

          That’s rather concerning, but doesn’t really answer what I was asking. I was wondering what eventually ends up destroying prions out in nature, presuming something does (I imagine something must, otherwise after hundreds of millions of years of complex life existing, wouldn’t prions just be absolutely everywhere, making any life using the affected proteins basically impossible?)

          • IHeartBadCode
            3•6 months ago

            Ah! Well you want this one then.

            And something to remember, the prions we’re talking about really only came about with the advent of mammals. And we know of only one or two more kinds of prions and that’s about it. But it’s likely that there are prions for all kinds of animals out there and that there is a increase and decrease of particular kinds of prions based on the prevalent animals of the time.

            So the PrP family of prions may just be having a recent “in all of life on this planet context” swelling of numbers. And when mammals aren’t around any longer, they’ll see a precipitous decline. Maybe this is some underlying factor that drives some kind of quantum evolution (which is a very controversial idea that evolution has “spikes” that drive rapid evolution from time to time), very likely not but fun to think about at least to me.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•6 months ago

              Ah, so if Im understanding that correctly, things like weather and microbial activity does destroy them over time, just slowly enough that they can persist at levels reasonably likely to cause infection for a very long time? Now Im sort of wondering just how long its possible to detect them in any concentration for, and if its possible to deduce any kind of useful information about the proteins that they were “supposed” to be from one. Like, given that they arent living things that need food or energy, might there still be a few prions from currently extinct species still around, in places that are free of the things that normally slowly degrade them? Could such prions if found tell us anything useful about the biochemistry of the species that they came from? It also has me thinking about how, if they can get inside plants and transmit that way and also have variants known to affect humans, and given that agricultural fields are both unguarded and impractical to completely monitor, they would make for an absolutely horrific sort of terrorist weapon, but thats not something Id like to contemplate too hard.

              It does surprise me to hear that we only know of a few types though. From the (very limited) understanding I had, I had sort of assumed that all proteins had a corresponding prion that represented some sort of lower energy ground state for them that they all had a tiny chance of spontaneously falling into, like, false vacuum decay but for proteins, or something.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•6 months ago

          Well fuck, yet another reason for me to hate lawns. They’re potential prion reservoirs!

    • IHeartBadCode
      15•6 months ago

      Wildfires can reach temperatures of 800°C (1470°F)!

      Good news: We destroyed the zombie prion. Bad news: Climate change is absolutely going to end us.

    • massive_bereavement
      8•6 months ago

      Prions are a fucking nightmare. It’s weird that at the end of day they’re just misfolded proteins.

      I’ll rather become a zombie than getting TSE. (My best wishes to those that suffer it and their loved ones.)

  • @[email protected]English
    4•6 months ago

    Welp, there’s my nightmare fuel for the day. Already knew prions were damnably difficult to get rid of on surfaces etc, hadn’t co soldered that CWD could realistically make the jump to humans.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•6 months ago

    A grim thought: wouldn’t the only way to deal with this effectively be… wiping out the dear population in an infected region?