‘Zombie Virus’ Killing Canada Deer; Experts Warn Hunters, Eaters

 

We’ve heard anti-vaxxers disseminate rumours that vaccinated people will someday turn into zombies. Although we joked about it, it seems that zombie viruses do exist and are killing deer in Canada.

According to VICE World News, a weird, debilitating, and highly infectious virus is wreaking havoc on Canada’s deer herds.

In some places of Canada, there is an outbreak of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which is a concerning occurrence. “This epidemic is sweeping among deer in the prairies and parklands," said Margo Pybus, a wildlife disease expert with the Alberta government’s fish and wildlife department and a researcher at the University of Alberta.

The illness initially appeared in Canada in 1996 on an elk farm and subsequently spread to wild populations. CWD was discovered in a sample given as part of the hunter monitoring program, in which hunters send samples of captured animals to be tested for the illness.

Although deer are the most common hosts for CWD in North America, the illness may infect any cervid, including elk, moose, and caribou. Infected animals soon become ill, becoming skinny and feeble.

A prion disease infection, such as CWD, does not include any genetic information, unlike viruses and bacteria that takeover host cells. According to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, chronic wasting illness takes over a deer’s neurological system and is always deadly. They also might lose their fear of people and other predators, and display symptoms like drooling, stumbling, poor coordination, sadness, behavioural abnormalities, and paralysis.

Because of these symptoms, some observers have dubbed CWD “zombie disease," especially since deer may also spread the illness through animal-to-animal contact, particularly through urine and saliva.

CWD can take a few years for infected deer to develop outward signs, which actually only arise in the later stages of illness, perhaps the last month or so.

The illness has not yet been found to spread to people, but it is a danger to deer and elk populations.

However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly indicates that both human hunters and consumers can be compromised to CWD, either through inadequate carcass handling, which could allow blood or spinal and brain substances to enter the body through simple ingestion of the flesh, since the prion that leads to CWD does not degrade and remains prone to infections when cooked.

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