Deer Are Dying Of 'Zombie Disease'; What Is It And Can It Infect Humans?

As the world continues to reiterate that "COVID-19 is not over" in the third year of the pandemic, another strange and rather highly communicable disease is spreading among the deer population in Canada West. Vice World News has reported that the disease impacting deer in Canada is named chronic wasting disease (CWD) which is an alarming phenomenon also known as 'zombie disease'. It is to note that experts have flagged CWD’s repercussions in the near future on ecological and conservation impacts.

A wildlife disease specialist with the Alberta government’s fish and wildlife division and a researcher at the University of Alberta, told the media outlet, “There’s an epidemic of CWD in Alberta and Saskatchewan—and it’s already underway.” said that the “epidemic” among deer is raging through the species in prairies

Where was CWD first detected among deer?

As per the report, the highly communicable disease, was originally detected in captive deer at a research facility in the late 1960s. Later, the same illness was detected in wild populations in Colorado in 1981. Since then, chronic wasting disease has been found in at least 26 states and is now considered endemic to Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Montana.

However, in Canada, CWD first emerged in 1996 on an elk farm in Saskatchewan before spreading into the wild populations. Alberta, where the disease is now spreading rapidly among deer, confirmed the first case of the illness back in December 2005 in wild deer the media outlet that it was a game animal that was taken near the Saskatchewan border.

quoted by Vice World News as saying, “We’ve been doing steady surveillance since 2005 now we’re looking at CWD encroaching on the eastern edges of Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary.” CWD was first detected in Canada through a sample submitted under the hunter surveillance in which hunters provide samples of harvested animals to check for the disease.

Even though the majority of CWD cases in Canada were observed in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba reported its first documented wild case in late 2021, as per the report.

More about CWD

CWD belongs to a peculiar class of pathogens called which is also the same class of diseases to which bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) belongs. BSE is commonly called mad cow disease. Scrapie which infects sheep and goats and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which impacts humans also belong to the same category CWD

While viruses and bacteria hijack the host cells before the symptoms are observed, no such genetic information is involved in a disease caused by prions. What makes prion disease infections more strange is that prions do not have genes and are instead composed of amino acids just like any other protein, stated the report citing Dr. David the Canada research chair in prion diseases and director of the for Prion and Protein Folding Diseases.