The Chronic Wasting Disease Also Called The Zombie Phenomenon (1)
The reports read dramatically: "zombie deer" spread further and further into the US, their central nervous system destroyed by an abnormal protein. It is only a matter of time before people are affected. What's this zombie alarm - and how big is the risk for people really?
The animals appears to suffer from Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). The disease affects the brain, spinal cord and other nerve cells of red deer, elks and reindeer and is comparable to the cattle disease, BSE and the sheep disease, scrapie. Triggers are so-called prions, abnormal proteins that attack nerve cells and are extremely resistant to common disinfection processes such as heating. Thus, there is no cure, animals die.
But it appears that CWD is not a new phenomenon. First cases were already documented in the late 1960s in the US state of Colorado in wild animals. From Colorado, the disease spread to Wyoming in the 1990s, with areas in the Midwest, Southwestern United States and individual areas on the US East Coast added since 2000. Particularly many reports of the cases of the diseases have been recorded from the states of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 24 US states and two provinces in Canada were affected by January. In South Korea, a herd of Watipi deer imported from Canada fell ill. In Europe, the disease has so far surfaced in Finland and Norway.
The first case was documented by Norway in April 2016, after which 11,000 wild animals were tested, the authorities found two reindeer and two elk to be affected. To limit the problem, Oslo released a whole reindeer herd of about 2200 animals for shooting. In Finland, a dead moose was found in February 2018 who had CWD.
Thank you very much for reading
Image Credit: Express UK,
References: Express UK, Vox, Time
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