@Icegoddess wrote:
@Kitty Galore wrote:
@Icegoddess wrote:
I think Chronic Wasting Disease is rather widespread. It's in AL too.
@Icegoddess that's the reason responsible hunters give for hunting . I used to hate the idea of hunters , Untimely coming around to it may be more humane then letting these beautiful creatures due from no food through the winter. I truly wish there could be a program country wide to feed them through winter months . I know it's pie in the ski but if only .......
@Kitty Galore It's the hunters who are mostly responsible for the reporting of this disease. It would be difficult to track it without them. Chronic Wasting Disease has nothing to do with lack of food. It's a disease that keeps them from gaining weight. I don't know if that means they just don't eat or if they cand eat all they want and still waste away. Better if they could come up with a vaccine for it that could be spread by food.
Deer are a food source from many of the predators that have been decimated around populations centers, like cougars. Without a natural means of culling out the deer, and with no hunters, the deer would overpopulate. That's the reason they starve due to lack of food.
Of course, all the building and removing of the forests doesn't help either. Deer will populate small wild areas. I used to see them along the railroad tracks near a RR crossing I frequent. Sadly, they're building a huge apartment complex there now. My sister's back yard has utilities running across it, so she is not allowed to do any landscaping. But, she gets deer. I've actually seen them in my little suburban neighborhood late at night. I guess they felt at home next to the wire deer the people have in their yard.
There's a wooded area behind my house, but I've never seen deer there. I get fox and coyote. But, my neighbor told me she saw a deer cross over into that area this past summer right after that building project I mentioned above started. Apparently all the rabbits moved into the area too, which does not make me happy.
@Icegoddess @Kitty Galore It is a neurogenerative disease. The brains of the deer become filled with spaces, technically, spongiform, like a sponge, and neurological symptoms continue to affect all the animal's functioning. The animals loose control of their entire nervous system and then they die. It's caused by an infective agent known as a prion. Prions are extremely difficult to destroy. The are not destroyed by cooking. Prions are not living. This agent causes proteins within cells of the nervous system to misfold.* The disease is like other prion diseases, mad cow disease, for example. Prion diseases have notoriously long incubation periods. One type, kuru, which occurs in humans in Papua, New Guniea can have a 50 year incubation period. Just handling the brains and spinal cord as well as eating meat of infected animals or humans can spread the infection. Humans that contracted mad cow from eating infected meat had around a ten year incubation period in the UK.
I am concerned that not enough has been learned yet about CWD in deer to know if humans can become infected from infected deer, though there are no known cases so far. I love deer but I'd be afraid of eating deer meat or making direct contact until more is known, but this is only my personal feelings. CWD is quickly spreading through the U.S. and Canada. "CWD is transmitted directly through animal-to-animal contact, and indirectly through contact with objects or environment contaminated with infectious material (including saliva, urine, feces, and carcasses of CWD-infected animals." Quote from United States Geological Survey.
Originally cattle became infected because they were fed infected cattle parts and bone meal from infected animals which led to an outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK. The disease is technically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Th US and other countries stopped the practice of feeding cattle their own parts, which included parts of their nervous systems, brains and also bones. The US very, very closely monitors cattle here and the disease is almost eradicated.
Other prion diseases are Kuru in humans from a tribe in Papua, New Guniea. One member of the tribe that developed kuru had had a 50 year incubation period between his exposure and his disease. Members of the tribe no longer handle the brains or nervous systems of their dead, or directly handle their dead. The tribe used to practice the eating of tiny parts of their dead, which was how the infection was spread amongst them. They no longer engage in the practice.
In humans, there is also a spontaneously occurring prion disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and a variant of it that came from eating infected beef (beef infected with mad cow disease). There was approximately an eight to ten year incubation period for the human variant seen in the UK.
There's also another prion disease that's found in sheep and goats. It's called scrapie. Scrapie has been known about for hundreds of years and is not transmissible to humans.
* It would take way too long to discuss protein folding here.
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