IT’S not good news for North American deer, and it’s not good news for anyone who hunts them for food.
Deer infected with chronic wasting disease, which is similar to BSE, carry a significant amount of the abnormal prion protein in their muscle. While no one knows if CWD can jump from deer and elk to people as BSE did, if it does, anyone eating infected meat from the two provinces of Canada and 13 states of the US where CWD has been recorded might be at risk.
Glenn Telling of the University of Kentucky at Lexington and colleagues infected the brains of mice engineered to be susceptible to CWD with tissue from the thigh muscle of an infected deer. Twelve to 18 months later, the mice developed neural symptoms typical of the disease (Science: DOI: 10.1126/science.1122864).
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The prions were found in the muscle of deer already ill with CWD, and North American hunters have been warned not to eat obviously sick animals. But we don’t yet know, Telling warns, whether the infection already lurks in muscle from animals still incubating the disease. “If I were a hunter, I would be cautious about eating deer in areas affected,” he says.
