‘Zombie deer disease’: US cases surge - wasting illness could spread to humans

The deadly disease has cropped up in Kansas, Wisconsin and Nebraska, where more than 40 counties have reported cases. Photo / 123RF

“Zombie deer disease” could spread to humans, scientists have warned as cases surge across the United States.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD), which causes infected animals to become listless and jittery, often drooling and grinding their teeth with a zombie-like blank stare, has spread to 32 US states and four Canadian provinces, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The deadly disease has cropped up in Kansas, Wisconsin and Nebraska, where more than 40 counties have reported cases, USA Today reports, and has also been found in 800 samples of deer, elk and moose throughout Wyoming.

“We’re dealing with a disease that is invariably fatal, incurable and highly contagious,” Dr Cory Anderson, co-director of a CWD programme at University of Minnesota, told The Guardian.

“Baked 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.”

CWD’s spread across the US could become a “slow-moving disaster” with the potential to spread to humans, Dr Michael Osterholm, the US epidemiologist who warned Britain of the risks to humans of mad cow disease, told USA Today.

In 2019, Dr Osterholm, the regents professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, told politicians laboratory research suggested it was “probable” that human cases of CWD would occur in future.

‘Cases not isolated events’

Discussing his experience of mad cow disease being transmitted to humans, he said it was likely CWD would also occur through eating contaminated meat.

“It is possible that the number of human cases will be substantial and will not be isolated events,” he told a hearing at the time.

He added: “If Stephen King could write an infectious disease novel, he would write about prions [proteins] like this.”

CWD makes deer drastically lose weight, struggle to walk, more aggressive and less afraid of human contact.

The illness has been compared to mad cow disease because it is also spread by pathogenic proteins called prions and causes a range of symptoms that resemble dementia and ultimately cause death.

Prion diseases belong to a family of rare brain diseases that affect humans and animals, including mad cow disease in cattle and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has raised concerns that CWD may also pose a risk to humans – but has not recorded any cases of infection in people.