A weird, debilitating, and highly infectious virus is wreaking havoc on Canada’s deer herds. The Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a concern in at least two of Canada's provinces - Alberta and Saskatchewan - according to health experts.
As per the report, the highly communicable disease, CWD, 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.
According to Centres for Disease Control (CDC), the CWD could spread to people through eating of infected deer or elk. This makes the hunters particularly vulnerable to the disease.
They may contract the infection through improper handling of the carcass, which might lead to blood or brain matter to enter the body, or through plain consumption of the flesh.
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.
To date, there have been no recorded cases in humans, but the U.S. Center for Diseases Control and Prevention “strongly recommends” having deer harvested from areas where CWD is known to be present before consuming it, and to not eat the meat if it tests positive.
