Zombie Deer Disease and Why We Should Fear it

This is the Zombie Apocalypse we should really be fearing because it is right at our doorstep. Now of course "Zombie Deer Disease" does not actually bring any deer back from the dead, they may just look like extras from The Walking Dead - Deer Edition. 

The proper name for this disease is Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and it is a progressive fatal degenerative neurological disease. Yeah, I know that all those words together are pretty freaking scary, however, you are in luck because so far it has only affected cervid populations. Cervids are the deer family, so moose, elk, mule deer, whitetail deer, reindeer, etc. and are found in all continents except Australia and Antarctica. CWD has been found in cervid populations in Canada, the United States, Norway, and South Korea (through imported deer). CWD is also a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy or TSE, other TSEs are Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or Mad Cow disease, Scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Fatal Familial Insomnia. TSEs are caused by abnormal proteins called prions.

A Healthy Stag (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer#/media/File:Family_Cervidae_five_species.jpg)

Effects:
The effects of CWD are pretty scary they include holes eaten into the brain, drastic weight loss, lack of coordination and lack of fear of people (https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/cwd-animals.html). Other than the obvious eating holes in the brain of the deer part there are also other reasons that this can wreak havoc on the populations. Discoordinated deer cannot protect themselves against predators like other deer can and they also do not realize that they should see humans as a threat. Also, deer with CWD by some reports die at a rate 3 times that of unaffected deer yearly. There are a few major problems that are hindering efforts to prevent CWD, first it has a really long incubation period of somewhere between 18 to 24 months and physiological symptoms do not show up until the very end. Also, it is really contagious among cervid populations and no one knows how to stop it yet. The main reason for the lack of prevention is it is not known how it is transmitted and even by depopulating any area it doesn't stop it from coming back in a totally new population later put in the area. Another reason that there is a problem is that not much can be done with the populations because no one knows how to stop it.

Deer suffering from CWD (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-finds-no-chronic-wasting-disease-transmissibility-macaques)

Research:

Luckily research has started to do with a few different aspects of CWD. At the University of Minnesota, they got $1.5 M to fund research into improving testing for CWD (https://www.vetmed.umn.edu/departments/veterinary-and-biomedical-sciences/spotlight/drs-pam-skinner-and-peter-larsen-aim-18m-funding-speed-chronic-wasting-disease-testing). Research was also done by the University of Wyoming to test the effects of CWD on cattle and it was found that cattle resist exposure to CWD which is good because it means that right now at least it will probably not transfer to cattle populations (http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2018/05/long-term-research-shows-domestic-cattle-resist-oral-exposure-to-chronic-wasting-disease.html). The NIH also did a study to see if there was transmissibility of CWD to the primate Cynomolgus Macaque or Crab-eating Macaque for which they found no transmissibility which for humans is a good sign (https://jvi.asm.org/content/92/14/e00550-18).

Cynomolgus Macaque (https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/macaques/macaques/behaviour-and-communication/)

The Spread:
The best piece of news for humanity is actually that there is no piece of evidence for human risk yet. It has even been determined by some that most of the time a human can even eat deer meat infected with CWD. However, the threat of CWD is becoming more prevalently all the time with it now being in 21 states in the US.

Distribution of CWD in North America (https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/distribution-chronic-wasting-disease-north-america-0)

If you are interested, more information about CWD can be found at the CDC page of CWD (https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/index.html) and at the CWD website (http://cwd-info.org/faq/).