Study Suggests Chronic Wasting Disease Does NOT Jump the Species Barrier
Science Daily is reporting on results of study that suggests that people who consume deer and elk with chronic wasting disease (CWD) may be escaping infection by an inability of the infectious agent to spread to people.
Data from an ongoing multi-year study suggest that people who consume deer and elk with chronic wasting disease (CWD) may be protected from infection by an inability of the CWD infectious agent to spread to people. The results to date show that 14 cynomolgus macaques (monkeys) exposed orally or intracerebrally to CWD remain healthy and symptom free after more than six years of observation.
The study does not yet mean it is safe for people to eat elk or deer with CWD. According to SD:
CWD is a type of brain-damaging disease known as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) or prion disease. CWD primarily affects deer, elk, and moose.
Other TSE diseases include mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, scrapie in sheep, and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. Humans are not susceptible to sheep scrapie, but BSE appears to have infected about 200 people, primarily in Europe in the 1990s. Those findings provided the rationale for the present CWD-macaque study, which began in 2003.
