It's happening on commercial deer farms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of captive deer stricken with the dreaded chronic wasting disease (CWD) are being euthanized. As state Departments of Natural Resources (DNR) try to contain the lethal, incurable disease which threatens their all important hunting revenues, cattle farmers now worry the disease will "jump species." Deer on 11 farms in Wisconsin, alone, have been annihilated.
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Researchers from Case Western Reserve University have synthesized an artificial human prion, a scientific first that could eventually lead to treatments for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other deadly brain-wasting disorders.
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The DNR is warning hunters and people living in specific Michigan counties to be aware of Chronic Wasting Disease affecting the deer population.
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State officials in Minnesota say they are having a hard time fighting the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD). A deer with the illness, also known as "zombie deer disease," was recently found in Mississippi. CWD, which is spread by misfolded proteins known as prions, hasn't been known to infect people. But researchers have warned that it could.
Read moreNew cases of CWD, chronic wasting disease, have been detected in deer in Missouri and Arkansas. This is concerning because CWD is very similar to "mad cow disease."
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Lymph node samples, testing combats disease.
When the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) posted a video recently on Facebook showing deer hunters how to collect neck lymph node samples for private chronic wasting disease (CWD) testing, it went viral.
“We posted the video on our division Facebook page and I think it got something like 600 shares, which is pretty remarkable,” said Lou Cornicelli, DNR wildlife research manager. “There’s been interest from some hunters to take their own CWD samples outside our CWD-surveillance areas, so we
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New evidence about chronic wasting disease leads health officials to reconsider their advice
Canada’s leading pathologist on mad cow disease shook up the deer hunting world this year when she delivered to an international gathering of prion disease experts an alarming study with implications for human exposure to chronic wasting disease (CWD).
By feeding moderate amounts of diseased venison to macaques monkeys over a period of years, Dr. Stefanie Czub found what no one wanted her to find: CWD can be transmitted to non-human primates who are
Read moreSince being identified in the fall of 2014 among whitetail deer in a captive herd on a preserve in Holmes County, the fatal disease has not been found in Ohio deer, captive or wild. The Ohio Division of Wildlife monitors the place where the stricken deer lived and maintains rules and restrictions for hunting whitetails in the area.
Whether any future deer will die of CWD in Ohio can be debated with skepticism and not predicted with certainty.
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Eating meat from cattle with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease, can lead to the development of variant Creutzfled-Jakob Disease (vCJD), an incurable progressive brain disorder.
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