In case you didn’t have enough on your plate to worry about, a new report has emerged revealing that two hunters have become the first Americans to die due to “zombie deer” disease. Yes, you read that correctly. We might be living through a nightmare zombie apocalypse, but instead of flesh-eating humans, it’s just a really nasty disease that started killing deer and left them looking like something from the set of “The Walking Dead,” but jumped to humans. It’s like a new version of horror author Stephen King’s masterpiece, “The Stand,” only we’ll change the it to “The Deer Stand.”
Or we could just use the same title and change the cover to feature a gnarly, spooky deer stand. Okay, let’s get back to business.
According to a new report from the Daily Mail:
Experts have been warning for years that the nearly 100 percent fatal chronic wasting disease (CWD) – which leaves deer confused, drooling, and unafraid of humans – could jump from animals to people. But a new study theorizes that it has already happened – in two hunters who died in 2022 after eating contaminated venison.
He was diagnosed after his death with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a brain-wasting condition that has been compared to Mad Cow Disease. The hunter’s friend also died from the disease but there were limited details about his condition in the research published last week in the journal Neurology.
The researchers are from Texas but details about where the deaths happened is also not known. DailyMail.com has reached out to the researchers for comment. CJD is caused by misfolded proteins – when proteins do not fold into the correct shape – called prions.
I bet the health obsessed readers are wondering what in the world causes CJD? Well, the report says it occurs because of misfolded proteins called prions. Proteins need to fold into a specific shape and this disease is when that doesn’t happen.
After you get infected, these prions end up going throughout the entire victim’s central nervous system, while also leaving behind prion deposits in various organs in the body and in the brain as well. Researchers, however, think that because both hunters ate meat from the infected herd, they might have actually developed something called CWD.
‘Although causation remains unproven, this cluster emphasizes the need for further investigation into the potential risks of consuming CWD-infected deer and its implications for public health,’ the team wrote.
Research suggests it is possible that prions in CWD attach to elements of the environment may cause prion properties to be modified, including how infectious the disease is and the potential to infect other animal species or even humans. It may take more than a year for an infected animal to develop symptoms, which can include drastic weight loss, stumbling and listlessness.
CWD is nicknamed ‘zombie deer disease’ because it causes parts of the brain to slowly degenerate to a spongy consistency and animals will drool and stare blankly before they die. There are no treatments or vaccines, and the disease is 100 percent fatal.
While medical professionals don’t have a complete understanding of how the disease is transmitted, it is believed that it spreads from animal-to-animal through eating forage or drinking water that is contaminated by poop, or the animal being exposed to dead carcasses. It’s also possible that coming into direct contact with blood, urine, saliva, and urine might be responsible for the transmission of the illness as well.
If you have a farm and a deer dies on any part of your property, it is required to be tested for chronic, wasting disease. This nasty disease is so contagious that if even just one animal tests positive for it, the whole herd is considered to be infected.
Chronic wasting disease was initially discovered in 1967 in Colorado in captive deer. It has now been found in animals in at least 32 states, four Canadian provinces and four other foreign countries, according to the CDC. The three states with the largest distribution of CWD-infected deer are Kansas (49 counties), Nebraska (43 counties), and Wisconsin (43 counties).
“The most recent case in deer was in Kentucky last fall, according to the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife,” the report concluded.