This week, I'm not giving you a choice. I'm going right into the bad news. I came across this article and I think that it's just bad news that needs to be shared. Well, that's not fair. That's my domain. I know you have a category of news that needs to be shared. And that's my only category. So I don't have a category for that. I have bad news, but I'm jumping right to this bad news article because it's news that needs to be shared. It's not its own category just to be clear.
I'm not stealing from Taylor. This is from The Guardian and it was posted December 22nd, 2023. Fairly recent and it is titled Zombie Deer Disease. Epidemic spreads in Yellowstone. A scientist raised fears it may jump to humans. This has come up in an episode before too. I just can't remember which one. Did it come up in an episode? I know we've talked about it. Which is why I brought it up because I know I've read some stuff about chronic wasting disease. Yeah, prions.
Yeah, so I've read something about it and then you told me that's what it was because it was just an article about a deer acting really weird. So I was like, listen to this. It's really cool and you told me about this. So that's why I wanted to read it. So when the mule deer buck died in October, it perished in a place most humans would consider the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road. At its last breath, we're not taken in an isolated corner of American geography.
It succumbed to a long dreaded disease in the back country of Yellowstone National Park, Northwest Wyoming, the first confirmed case of chronic wasting disease in the country's most famous nature reserve. For years, chronic wasting disease in brackets CWD, of course, we've got to make it an acronym, caused by prions, abnormal transmissible pathogenic agents. I said that really good. Good job me. I'm off to a great start today. This is going to be a great day.
It's been spreading stealthily across North America with concerns voiced primarily by hunters after spotting deer behaving strangely. The prions caused changes in the host's brain and nervous system, leaving animals drooling, lethargic, emaciated, stumbling with a telltale blank stare that led some to call it zombie deer disease. It spreads through the Servid family, deer elk, moose, caribou, and reindeer. It is fatal with no known treatments or vaccines.
This discovering Yellowstone, whose ecosystem supports the greatest and most diverse array of large wild mammals in the continental US, represents an important public wake-up call, says Dr. Thomas Rof, a vet and former chief of animal health for the Fish and Wildlife Service at US Federal Agency. This case put CWD on the radar of widespread attention in ways it wasn't before, and that's ironically a good thing, he says. It's a disease that has huge ecological implications.
Rof has been predicting CWD would reach Yellowstone for decades, warning that both the federal government and the state of Wyoming needed to take aggressive measures to help slow it spread. Those warnings went largely in heated, he said, and now the consequences will play out before millions who visit the park each year. The area constitutes a vast laboratory for observing what happens when CWD infiltrates an ecosystem with its original full complement of biological diversity.
Hundreds of thousands of elk and deer move through Yellowstone, supporting populations of grizzly bears, wolves, cougars, coyotes, and other scavengers. The disease is a slow-moving disaster, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who studied the outbreak of bovine spondiform encephalopathy. Encephalopathy. Yeah, or Macau disease. Encephalopathy. A related prion condition in the UK and is director- it is?
Yeah, pretty much as far as we're concerned, all prions are basically the same thing. They just impact different proteins. In the UK and is director of Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Corey Anderson recently earned his doctorate studying with Osterholm focusing on pathways of CWD transmission, what we're dealing with a disease that is invariably fatal, incurable, and highly contagious.
What's leaked into the worry is that we don't have an effective, easy way to eradicate it, neither from the animals it infects nor the environment it contaminates. Once an environment is infected, the pathogen is extremely hard to eradicate. It can persist for years in dirt or on surfaces and scientists report it is resistant to disinfectants for meldehyde radiation and incineration at 600 Celsius.
Wow. In the US and Canada, CWD has gained attention not only because it affects big game animals, but also because of the possibility that it could jump the species barrier. Dear Elk and Moose could infect livestock, other mammals, birds, or even humans. Epidemiologists say the absence of the spillover case yet does not mean that it won't happen. CWD is one of a cluster of fatal neurological disorders that includes BSE.
BSE, Mad Cow, Outbreak in Britain, provided an example of how overnight things can get crazy with the spillover event happens from, say, livestock to people, Anderson says. We're talking about the potential of something similar occurring. No one is saying that it's definitely going to happen, but it's important for people to be prepared.
Dr. Rayna Plowrout, a disease ecologist at Cornell University, says CWD should be viewed against a backdrop of dangerous emerging zoonotic, zoonotic, pathogens that are moving back and forth across species barrier between humans, livestock, and wildlife globally. Things occur as human settlements and agricultural operations press deeper into environments where contact with disease-carrying animals is increasing.
With the hunting season underway in the US and US Centers for Disease Control and Individual State strongly recommend that harvested game animals be tested for disease and that meat for cervids that appear ill should not be consumed. Chelsea, do you know much about prions? I know I don't, but I have a rough understanding of them. But kind of, I know that it makes the max super crazy.
It would be scary to see, but I think if you want to share the knowledge, because I think you, the limited knowledge you have is more than I have. Most diseases we know are either viral or bacterial. You're aware of those words, right? Bacteria, very much so a living organism that is infected the species. We kill it with antibiotics, anti-living thing. Viruses, it's kind of a gray area or whether technically they're alive or not, but we can treat them with some different medicines.
Prions don't really meet the definition at all of a living organism. They're basically just a single strand of protein that has changed its shape from what you would normally expect. And when it comes into contact with other proteins, it changes their shape as well. Because it's not alive, we don't really know how to treat these things or how to stop them or even when they'll necessarily jump the species barrier because it's just proteins.
So that's why these things are so terrifying is because they're definitely not a living thing. They're literally just a single protein, which we're made up of proteins. Like that's basically all we are. Okay. If it comes into contact with your protein, suddenly your proteins aren't the right shape for what they're supposed to do. Okay, that makes sense. And it spreads throughout your body. So this is like, well, they already said it, it's like a zombie disease.
Yeah, more or less, it's going to completely change your nervous system and basically all the cells it comes into contact with. Well, that's terrifying. DNA at the end of the day is made up of just amino acids and proteins. So yeah, I might have known that. Yeah. And there is a form of prion disease in humans is called Crutsfeld Jacob disease, basically the human equivalent of mad cow.
I have no idea if these are different prions that instigate all of these, and that is the limit of what I understand about prions is that that's why they're so hard to actually treat. Okay. Because we don't know how to stop something that's not living. Yeah. Or how to stop them from realigning your proteins as well. So hence why it's in the bad news category. Yeah. This article does go on.
It talks about people feeding wildlife in settings like this, which is contributing to what's going on, which I'm quite familiar with. I mean, most people would be quite familiar with if you live anywhere in your nature, you shouldn't be feeding wildlife. As far as this disease goes, it's scary from seeing how animal, I mean, they act really unnaturally when they're infected with this type of thing. Is it an infection? Now I don't even know. I guess technically this disease.
They called it a disease in the article. Yeah. When they have this disease, they act really, I mean, they're not acting dear like at all. And it's super creepy, which is where I heard about it in the first place. It was on like a paranormal subgroup that someone was talking about a deer acting unnaturally, which I agree would be super creepy, but poor animals. As far as I know, I've only heard about it in three species, humans, cows and deer.
I'm sure there's more out there, but those three seem to be the most concerning. And I've never heard of it, man, a bird. No, but they got their own thing going on. Maybe birds don't have proteins because they're not real. Yeah, that's a fair point. They're specifically metal, which actually helps out the birds are real. Categorical. And on that note, that's as far as we're legally allowed to actually talk about that topic now. So thank you all for listening.
We will change the topic in 48 hours. Goodbye.