![]() Let’s walk through what we know about this emerging infectious disease. “There is currently no way for people to rapidly test for prions in meat, on meat processing surfaces, or in live deer,” he said. People should not consume infected meat, he said, while also noting there’s actually no good way to know if meat is infected. “We don’t want to find out 10 years from now,” Osterholm told Vox, “that we should have been doing something in 2019 but didn’t.”Īccording to Larsen, it’s not time to freak out, but he warned that this is a growing public health threat. Sitting before a state committee in Minnesota on February 7, he called the chances of humans becoming infected with chronic wasting disease “probable” and “possible,” adding: “The number of human cases will be substantial and not isolated events.” Osterholm, it turns out, also warned the British government of the risks of mad cow before hundreds of people were infected in the UK and around the world in the late 1990s. Still, the experimental research spurred Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, to compare chronic wasting disease to mad cow recently. Since then, there’s been no direct evidence of human disease, even in people who ate meat that later tested positive for the pathogenic prions. In a paper published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers from Scotland and Canada showed via an experiment in a petri dish that prions from sick animals can indeed infect human cells. (Mad cow in people is known as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.) Late last summer, we got a preliminary and frightening answer. Researchers have long wondered whether the disease, like mad cow, can make the leap into humans. So we’re talking about an indestructible, killer pathogen that could be lurking anywhere. When new outbreaks start, they are virtually impossible to contain because, unlike viruses and bacteria, prions can’t be killed. (It’s been identified in Canada and Norway, too.) That’s how the disease ended up in South Korea, Larsen said. It’s also spreading among captive deer, elk, and reindeer, which are transported around the country and overseas to hunting ranches, petting zoos, and Christmas-themed farms. “What we’ve seen over the last few decades is that it’s slowly spreading in wild deer populations,” said Peter Larsen, an assistant professor in veterinary sciences at the University of Minnesota who has been studying the pathogen. While the disease is still rare, researchers believe it’s more widespread than ever due, in part, to how humans trade deer and other hoofed mammals. When they infect an animal, they eat away at its brain, causing a cascade of symptoms that resemble dementia and eventually lead to death. Like mad cow, the disease is spread by prions, the zombie-like pathogenic proteins that aren’t alive and can’t be killed. Known as chronic wasting disease, the fatal progressive neurodegenerative illness was first identified in the 1960s. A mad cow-like infectious disease that can turn the brains of deer, elk, and moose into “Swiss cheese” is spreading in at least 24 states - and some experts are warning that it could eventually make its way into humans. ![]()
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