this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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“As soon as a deer is infected, it begins to shed infectious prions in semen, blood, urine, saliva and antler velvet to other deer and its surrounding habitat. Before death, an infected deer will drool, lose coordination, waste away and behave in a demented fashion.
The 230 people killed by mad cow disease in the United Kingdom all died in a similar and horrible fashion. That event in the 1990s occurred after the contamination of U.K.’s beef food chain by 180,000 contaminated cattle that had been fed bone meal.
Brain-eating prions simply defy traditional biology. They are smaller than the smallest known virus and can survive in tissue long after death. They can cross the species barrier and incubate for decades. They appear to be almost indestructible and can contaminate pastures, animal feed, feeding equipment, medical tools and blood. Only combustion at 1,000 degrees Celsius can destroy prion infectivity. Incredibly, prions can remain infectious after burning at 600 degrees Celsius.
According to Rowledge, decomposing carcasses flood prions into the environment, “binding to minerals and creating ‘super-sites’ that remain infectious for years or even decades.” In addition to direct animal-to-animal spread, CWD prions remain infectious on plants and almost any surface, in soil and water, and can persist in the environment for decades.”
So a 1967 lab experiment in Colorado created a disease that has already spread to three continents, and is causing the extinction of all deer, moose, elk, and reindeer - grazers that play an integral role in maintaining homeostasis of flora and fauna on Earth’s major land biomes. It can be (I read WILL BE) transmitted to other species, including humans. It infects soil, water, and vegetation where it lives for decades. It is 100% fatal.
This isn’t just affecting deer; when it crosses to humans, not even vegans would be able to avoid it.
I think I just got Bingo on my apocalypse card.
CWD doesn't appear to have been created in a specific experiment, but has emerged multiple times wherever elk were kept in close captivity. It's possible that it occurs when enough randomly misfolded PrP can build up to levels where it can be transmitted between animals, much like all other prion diseases. Source: I live near "ground zero" in Saskatchewan where it escaped from elk farms and no longer hunt deer or eat deer meat. Have done a lot of research on the topic as the environmental impact is devastating.
"When it crosses to humans" is not a sure thing. Prions are not like other infectious diseases and cannot evolve in the same way. While it's possible that humans could be infected by PrP^CWD^ this does not mean that human PrP will be folded into more PrP^CWD^ but it's more likely to fold into an intermediate dead-end form. In fact this is the reason that hunters are not dying everywhere from CWD, and why the death toll from BSE was so remarkably low despite broad exposure. Prions are thankfully not very compatible across species.
CWD cannot "breed" in humans to create a human form because it's not alive. It's not even questionably alive like viruses are - it's just a protein in an unfortunate shape that catalyzes more of itself to change shape. It's a very odd evolutionary defect that PrP is normally folded into a state that is not its lowest energy state, and we're fortunate that PrP appears to be the only protein that is "broken" like this. The human form of the disease is called "kuru" and it only occurred in rare cannibal societies.
Even real infectious zoonotic diseases often have a dead-end form like this when crossing species. As a sheep farmer I'm very familiar with the viral disease we call "orf" which I have caught from sheep several times on my hands. It creates a horrifying looking sore, but when the sheep virus infects human cells, the incompatible cellular machinery cannot create viable infectious particles. As a result, it's only contagious from sheep to humans - not from humans to humans - and cannot spread from the initial infection site, either.
So worry about CWD destroying the ecosystems of North America (and Europe as some absolute morons imported deer from NA) but not about catching it, especially from eating things that are not deer, moose or elk.
No joke! Should it crossover I think even the super rich would find themselves hard pressed to escape it. Maybe some personal danger for the super rich would prompt them to start caring and invest in research on it? Guessing it’d be way too little too late as usual though.
Wait, what lab experiment? Prions don't need to be created. That protein can mis-fold randomly, in any of the creatures it occurs in. There's a ridiculously small chance that you or I could one day just have an unlucky mis-fold and develop the disease without any prior exposure.
From the article:
“Chronic wasting disease first erupted at an experimental agricultural station in Colorado in 1967 where scientists were conducting feeding experiments on captive deer. Sheep infected with scrapie, another prion disease, served as the control group.”
And yet brain-eating bugs are still somehow more terrifying than prions.
Breh that’s not what “first identified” means. Lay off the conspiracy crap, is bad for you.
From the article, bruh:
“This is a highly fatal and contagious disease that humans created” (said Rowledge).
“Chronic wasting disease first erupted at an experimental agricultural station in Colorado in 1967 where scientists were conducting feeding experiments on captive deer. Sheep infected with scrapie, another prion disease, served as the control group.”
Allowed to spread and develop through bad legislative decisions around game ranching /=/ created or engineered by humans in a lab. Humans had a hand in allowing this disease to evolve and spread. But it was not engineered in a lab and ‘created’ by humans as ops comment seemed to indicate. Again Breh, that’s not what ‘first erupted’ means. I don’t disagree with Rowledge’s point that human decisions lead to the state we’re in now. But saying we created the disease is dangerously close to conspiracy theory misinformation that I believe it’s a bad idea to perpetuate. Also not a single other paper or article words the development like that. Rowledge has a vested interest in protecting wildlife and therefor has incentive to embellish in order to provoke action.