AFP: Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces

 

Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces

(AFP) – 20 hours ago

PARIS — Brain-destroying prion disease can spread among deer through faeces shed by animals which have been infected by the deadly pathogen but are not sick, a study published on Wednesday suggests.

The paper implies that the mysterious disorders known as chronic wasting disease (CWD) and scrapie -- cousins of mad-cow disease -- could be transmitted in a hitherto-overlooked way, posing a headache for farmers.

The scientists are led by University of California neurologist Stanley Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into prions, the rogue proteins blamed for turning brains spongey.

Prion diseases are well-researched disorders in deer (CWD), cattle (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE), sheep and goats (scrapie), cats (feline spongiform encephalopathy, FSE) and in humans (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CJD).

Many aspects about them are unclear, though. In deer, CWD is known to be handed on from mother to offspring, but other paths of infection are deemed possible.

Publishing in the British journal Nature, Prusiner's team probe a theory that deer may pass on the prion in their faeces, thus creating a risk that other deer will pick up the pathogen in the soil when they graze.

AFP: Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces