Scientists fear a 'zombie' disease could spread to humans as deer are dying after being infected by an illness in the same family as mad cow disease.
This strange and highly contagious disease is spreading among the deer population in Canada West.
Canada has named chronic wasting disease (CWD) a 'zombie disease'.
The infected animals grow thin and weak. They lose their fear of humans and other predators, drool, stumble, have poor coordination, depression, behaviour changes, and paralysis.
These symptoms have led to some people calling the infection the ‘zombie disease’. Connecting the infection to zombies is even more appropriate as deer can pass the illness through animal-to-animal contact, especially in urine and saliva.
CWD infection or ‘Zombie disease' has not yet been detected in humans. However, the United States Centre for Diseases Control, and Prevention “strongly recommends” having deer harvested from areas where the communicable disease is known to be present before consuming the animal, and not eating if it tests positive.
It was originally detected in captive deer at a research facility in the late sixties. 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.
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.
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CWD belongs to a peculiar class of pathogens called prions 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 (vCJD) which impacts humans also belong to the same category as CWD.