Rise of the Zombie Deer | Hacker News Reader

Rise of the Zombie Deer

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206 pointsmooreds96 comments

I too find this disease terrifying.

Hunting of white tail deer is very popular where I am from. Everyone has family members who hunt and stock up on venison. It's very common for people to share their meat with friends and neighbors and cook venison around a camp fire. Many harvested deer have been tested and confirmed infected for at least a decade now. Most people do not get their deer tested. Certain WMU (wildlife management units) are mandated that all kills be tested. Also most people field dress their own deer which means lots of blood and fluids from the deer on their hands and clothes.

I have seen a CWD deer in the wild not far from my house. It was scrawny and shaking with the strangest look on its face [1] just walking down the middle of the road. Very abnormal behavior for a deer. It's just a matter of time before it jumps to humans.

Joe Rogan actually covered CWD on one of his podcasts [2] with a few biologists as guests. You can find videos [3] of CWD on YouTube.

1. https://www.thenews.com.pk//assets/uploads/updates/2019-02-1...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHOUpczwcyA

3. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cwd+deer

`It's just a matter of time before it jumps to humans.`

... thats not how that works.

I do believe that cwd can jump to humans can jump to humans

Vulnerability to prion diseases is not as universal in human populations as with bacterial and viral infections - for example it’s been observed that people with certain genes never develop vCJD from eating BSE-infected meat (or at least their genes postpone the onset by at least a few decades).

AFAIK there's no direct evidence of prion diseases jumping species. The classic studies of scrapie prions failed to show cross-species transmission even with direct injection of infected material into the brains of rodents.

Everyone assumes BSE prions from cows are causing CJD in humans, but an alternative explanation is that organized crime was disposing human bodies in hamburger factories, and CJD is just caused by human prions.

There was at least one cluster of vCJD (in Queniborough) traced to a small traditional slaughter house that was providing to butcher shops, and that cross contamination was occurring because in a slaughter/butchering operation with only a few people it is much easier for the prions to be carried from the brain/spinal tissue to the expensive steaks. A consequence of this was that all small abattoirs in the United Kingdom went out of business.

So your theory has at least one strong counter example

"Soto’s team analyzed the retention of CWD and other infectious prion proteins and their infectivity in wheat grass roots and leaves that had been incubated with prion-contaminated material. They discovered that even highly diluted amounts of the material can bind to the roots and leaves. From there, they fed the wheat grass to hamsters, which became infected with the disease."

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2015/06/researchers-make-surp...

If you read the article instead of the press release, you'll see that Soto's group showed that wheatgrass can be contaminated by hamster prions or CWD prions, but that they only showed transmission of hamster prions to hamsters through exposure to the contaminated wheatgrass. That's not cross-species transmission.

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(15)004...

"Everyone assumes BSE prions from cows are causing CJD in humans, but an alternative explanation is that organized crime was disposing human bodies in hamburger factories, and CJD is just caused by human prions."

Yes, that is indeed an alternative explanation, but has it actually been proposed seriously and is there any reason to believe that has ever happened ? I am genuinely curious...

shrug I don't recall seeing it in print anywhere. I've mentioned it to colleagues who study prions, and they're grossed out by the idea, but didn't think it was impossible.

I suppose you could try testing samples of hamburger for human DNA, but it would be hard to rule out innocent low levels of contamination from household dust (mostly human skin cells). Considering prions are infectious at such very low concentrations I'm not sure if any assay could rule it out.

If you read the article, this disease, like it’s relative Mad Cow Disease, can probably infect humans, but is not likely to surface until many years after infection.

4 paragraphs down in the main article talks about this. Yeah they don't "jump" if that's your concern. But have you ever licked your fingers without washing your hands? Are you a hunter that might have deer blood on your hands?

Doesn't have to be blood, you can just eat the stuff. That's how mad cow disease spreads to humans. Cooking doesn't kill prions.

Actually the parent is correct. "That's not how it works". Specifically deer prions (but not other cervids like elk) don't seem to be transmissible to cows, both in the lab and in the wild, and not to mice or humans in the lab. It goes in both ways IIRC, cows nor mice can't go to deer.

Here's a citation for that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981193/

If it appeared to be transmissible to humans, there would be much stronger recommendations against eating venison, like with prion diseases in cows.

Joe was the first thing I thought of. I wonder how he handles this in his own hunting. Does he get them tested?

Yeah, this is pretty terrifying. I remember reading that prions might also be communicable via optical equipment.

There's no cure for prions, and they all kill you in nasty, interesting ways. Most involve driving you slowly insane and causing your body or brain to decay. The best possible treatment is antibodies, which we don't really have yet.

I remember reading that a population of people on a pacific island had high incidence rates of kuru due to eating each other's brains after death. I also remember that after a few hundred years of doing so, some had developed a resistance.

Seeing as prions mis-fold other proteins, might something like Folding@Home be able to contribute here? I would appreciate some insight from a person with knowledge of this area.

Edit: Corrected pacific island disease from mad cow to kuru; thanks noir_lord

I think it's not mad cow disease (or the human variant CJD) you mean, is it perhaps Kuru?

You're right, I appreciate the correction.

For any one curious, here's more detail on the resistance that has been developed: http://www.virology.ws/2015/06/12/resistance-to-prion-diseas...

anything involving prions is terrifying!

What freaked me out was learning that it is extremely difficult to sterilize surgical equipment such that prions are removed. If you are operated on with surgical equipment that was previously used on a person infected with prions (I'm talking about human prions here and not deer prions), even if the equipment was thoroughly sterilized, the prions are almost certainly still there and can be transferred to you.

hmm non-medical info here, but .. the washing action is important in cleaning, not just chemicals and heat.. many infections have to pass a certain critical volume to catch on.. no idea about prions specifically, but be careful about getting upset.. it is a problem itself

Prions are more like a persistent toxic chemical than any virus or bacteria.

The hypothesis for many prion diseases is that of "seeding" whereby a small number (or maybe even a single) prion protein acts as a template to induce misfolding of other proteins with similar sequence but native folds [1,2]. This causes a chain reaction in the proliferation of the prion protein inside the cell, and then in other cells as prion proteins are transported/secreted to the surrounding tissue.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665718/#S1titl... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5449729/

>whereby a small number (or maybe even a single) prion protein acts as a template to induce misfolding of other proteins

So, maybe Vonnegut was onto something when he wrote Cat's Cradle

There is an advantage in thinking about prions, and proteins more generally, as crystals rather than biological systems. A vat of fluid can sit for decades without ever forming a crystal. But then the addition of a single seed can give rise to an infinitely large, growing, structure.

It reminds me of the recent discussions around eyes and prions:

"Infectious 'Prions' Found in the Eyes of Patients with Fatal Brain Disease"

"The results also raise concern about the potential for the disease to spread through routine eye exams or eye surgeries, during which equipment could become contaminated with prions, the researchers said."

https://www.livescience.com/64140-creutzfeldt-jakob-disease-...

Want to get really terrified? Read about the chances of prions being passed between people. The first recognized prion-STD will come one day. It may already have happened. We don't test for these things. We could all be infected with hundreds of prions without knowing it. What pushes them into "disease" territory is negative symptoms.

But the upside is that prions are nothing new. Although we may not appreciate our defenses, the fact that we are all still alive is reason to believe we evolved some form of resistance to them.

How difficult and expensive is it to test a deer in the field after hunting it?

OTOH, possibly the oldest known prion disease is scrapie, which has been known in sheep for centuries. Scrapie, unlike BSE, does not appear to be communicable to humans. But: susceptibility to scrapie is highly genetic and easily tested for. Most shepherds in the US are doing genetic testing and selecting specifically for genetic immunity in their flocks. My own flock is about 75% fully immune, with the remainders having one of the two genes needed, which makes them highly resistant but not completely immune.

To me this seems indicative that there could well be pharmaceutical treatments for prion disease. They just haven’t been a big enough problem to really address yet.

It also may indicate that genetic resistance could quickly spread through deer populations once the disease starts exerting enough evolutionary pressure.

The disease will never exert strong evolutionary pressure as the symptoms start appearing well after deer will have reproduced.

No, the disease starts exhibiting symptoms after 2-3 years. Deer average five years and can live for up to ten years in the wild, and are reproductively active that entire time. So there is definitely some evolutionary pressure; a deer infected at age 1 year would be expected, on average, to have less than half the offspring of a healthy deer.

There's also the very real question of "Is there a non-deleterious mutation that confers resistance?"

It's not unusual to see deer around my house in the DC suburbs in VA(way beyond the zone depicted in the map), but we had a young one acting strangely last summer. It was just standing there, and wouldn't run if your approached it. It was very thin.

A neighbor called animal control, who came out and diagnosed this disease. They had to put the deer down, right there in the middle of the suburbs, which alarmed many neighbors.

fellow nova suburbanite here [vienna]

the degree to which deer have become comfortable around humans in the area in the last 5 years is incredible. I can be feet away from them on a jog and they won't flinch. I guess that's what happens when your only predator is a car

No coyotes and wolves around?

Coyotes will take deer, but they're not that quick to target healthy adult deer. In the suburbs, they generally end up in smaller packs going after both garbage and scrubland prey like rabbits, so they're not an especially good check on white-tailed deer. (Wolves would be, but then they're not going to be allowed to stay in most suburbs.)

There's a CWD hot spot about an hour by car from there in WV/MD/PA. It's been endemic there for 10 years or so, and has spread quite a bit.

I bow hunt deer in New Jersey. Hunting is sacred to me and I do it for the meat. It's great to see this shared here. CWD can be contained. Most hunters are aware of it and are doing their part to fight CWD. If you don't hunt, a simple way to help is to call the police on the off chance you see a deer acting strangely.

We're screwed if it makes it into NJ. Deer population density is too high to contain it here.

My family has a 50 acre farm in the northwest part of the state and hunters usually take up to 20 deer per hunting season. I used to count herds of up to 50 deer roaming the hay fields in summer.

Wolves are not an option in NJ and while coyotes have come back I don't think they take down deer.

I live in North-central NJ and they literally wander down the middle of the road in herds.

Where I live, we have a deer problem but houses are too close to hunt. I drive to my folk's place about an hour away to do it. Some towns hire professionals to take some out, but it's expensive. The meat does go to feeding the homeless though. I'd happily pay for the ability to hunt right in my town. It can be done safely.

We have way too many deer in our suburban area. It's technically possible to legally hunt in the area, but not practical. The permissions and everything else you need to get are way too onerous. The level of knowledge about the need to manage the deer herd for safety, public health, and deer health is just not there. Every fall the roads are stained with redish brown stains of deer being hit by cars. People get hurt or killed, and their cars get damaged.

Instead, this beneficial activity has been driven underground. We hear the deer being poached at night (when the poachers are using rifles). I imagine the more stealthy poachers are using crossbows.

I doubt anyone is regularly poaching with crossbows. Following a blood trail at night sucks, and while it’s definitely possible to kill cleanly and humanely with a bow, the deer typically has the ability to run for a few dozen yards at least.

Most poached deer where I am (Arkansas) are taken with small-caliber rifles - mostly .22 LR, but some .22 Mag and .17 HMR. They’re still loud but not nearly as loud as a centerfire rifle cartridge. They’re also generally extremely accurate and inexpensive.

It is scary, but at the same time can be managed. Some of the best information at this time comes from a gentleman named Bryan Richards. More info here:

https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-070-chronic...

and

https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/policy-and-legisla...

I expect in a few years that map[1] from the article will have to be updated to make the northeast very red. Natural predators are long gone and except for northern New England there is tons of governmental red tape to discourage hunting so deer populations tend to hover around the maximum the environment can support. I expect that since the disease has broken into upstate NY it will quickly move throughout the rest of the region.

[1]https://thecompost.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/newsletters/20...

I agree the map is understating the spread. However, natural predators are not long gone. Coyotes are spreading like crazy and bears are another huge deer predation species. Hunting may be limited in Massachusetts, etc. but I assure that is not true in NY or PA. In PA, schools are closed for the first day of deer season and ~500K people head off to the woods trying to find a deer.

Coywolves have just started moving into the suburban and urban east coast areas.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/coywolves-are-taki...

We've seen a few around. I remember coyotes from when I lived out west and these are quite a bit different.

It'll be interesting what happens as they become more numerous. They are a lot more adaptable and flexible than coyote.

CWD has essentially wiped out the elk populations of SW Colorado. There was an research center in that area dedicated to breeding CWD-resistant elk, but it shut down in 2016.

More info: https://durangoherald.com/articles/1824

At least in Wyoming and Colorado, overpopulation due to lack of predators has everything to do with ranchers killing those predators. Conservationists tell us the overpopulation either needs a sharp shooter's bullet to cull the herds, or we need more wolves and therefore wolves need protection from being shot by ranchers. And ranchers pretty thus far almost always win that contest.

What gets my goat is finicky meat eaters who somehow think they're entitled to a) beef and b) inexpensive beef. There's ton of game, in these two states, that eat plants which are basically inedible weeds to humans. Which is another thing that gets my goat, are vegetarians who want to rip out entire ecological systems to plant non-native plants so humans have food. Simple solution for all of our pest problems: eat more indigenous meat!

But then I look at this zombie map and I think, ugh. We've poisoned the well! Congratulations humans! You protected the cattle industry for so long that the native herds are contradicting disease you probably don't want to be eating.

I sympathize with a lot of your points, but take heart! People still harvest and eat deer in CWD-infected areas, they just test the deer before eating. If you get an infected deer, you destroy the meat and, I guess, take solace in knowing you removed an infected animal from the landscape.

> For example, prions in an infected deer's feces could bind to soil taken up by plants, spread to its leaves, then infect another deer that eats the leaves.

Terrifying. How old is this disease, and why is it only spreading now? Actually, there's not much in the article on the rate at which the infection is spreading - does anyone know more?

It is terrifying. For something even more terrifying, check out prion diseases in humans...Fatal Familial Insomnia, for one.

https://medium.com/@arifakhtar/dying-to-sleep-the-waking-nig...

CJD is the more common prion disease in humans and arguably even more terrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt–Jakob_disease

Not so fun fact - the medication HCG is derived from human urine and can possibly pass CJD on. There is no warning on the label, and since CJD takes 20-30 years to kill you once infected we don't really know yet if it's a problem or not.

And I took it for years.

Somehow I had assumed such things were produced using recombinant DNA, but I guess only one brand does it this way.

I'm kind of mind boggled at the concept of pregnant women selling their urine to medical companies. How does this work?

Both Progynon and Emmenin, the first forms of estrogen used (1928-29), were extracted from the urine of pregnant women. The material for Progynon was initially collected in a Berlin's clinic by Shering [1], and the urine needed for Emmenin was presumably sourced through similar channels. [2] mentions how the supply was scarce, as only women in low-income groups were interested in collecting it, and only while other sources of income were not available.

By 1941-1942 they had moved away from human urine to PREgnant MARe urINe, and Premarin was born.

[1] https://books.google.it/books?id=Z3iTsU6_mHsC&pg=PA119&redir...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1661006/?page=2

Similar and just as scary - tainted blood products taken by haemophiliacs leading to countless HIV infections, and plenty of deaths from AIDS.

We also seem to be coming to the realization in the last few years that HPV is likely spread through the sterilization and re-use of gynecological equipment.

Prion diseases as well - they can survive an autoclave.

It's less than a century old, first identified in the 60s and 70s, possibly coming from Rocky Mountain sheep farming operations in the early 1900s per http://cwd-info.org/faq/.

The reason it's fairly new is that it kills the deer, and so requires high population densities to spread. At low levels, an infected deer would die off quickly, and if the population density is low, another deer is unlikely to get infected. Without wolves, and with the huge farm operations that give deer thousands of acres of corn in which to feed, deer are so overpopulated that even if an infection kills quickly, the deer is likely to spread the disease to others.

See also http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox for a discussion on similar problems in human history: TLDR; old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the old world.

do you perhaps mean 'new-world cities with immigrants'?

or even better, let's just say "American cities" if that's what we mean, no sense using dated and confusing terminology.

Except that the cities in question are not exclusively American...

no -- OP meant the opposite of that. "Old-world" meaning anyone that traded with or interacted with the descendants of the first cities in the fertile crescent (aka anyone from Africa / Asia or Europe).

"old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the new world"

(Having watched the video): No, GP does mean "old-world cities with immigrants". However, GP meant to end with "that never developed in the new world".

The story, in brief: old-world cities, which were crowded, always had a fresh supply of (non-immune) immigrants, and had lots of human/animal contact, allowed the development of particularly lethal diseases. Such diseases did not develop in the new world, which lacked such cities. Thus there was no "americapox" to spread from the new world to the old.

I repeat the story without knowing/endorsing accuracy.

Plants take simple elements and compounds and make very complicated organic compounds. Fungus maybe could take a complicated protein and make something with it.

Plants taking animal proteins in grains of sand and spreading then over the entire vascular system without trying to isolate and inactivate it seems unprobable to me. They react and jail many fungus inside their cells all the time blocking the pass with latex and sap before to wrap it in cellulose and lignine.

We had to shoot these "omg zombie" deer with CWD in our backyard in the 50s, just seems like nobody really measured it or panicked about it back then.

Is CWD more or less prevalent than it was in the past? The article fails to even ask this question as you'd expect from the title, it just sort of weaves some other irrelevant wikipedia info into clickbait hysteria.

To actually spread and not just maintain a baseline of X% of the population a prions disease needs to have a certain population density because it is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids of infected individuals.

Deer predators have mostly been eradicated in the contiguous US so that leaves humans and "the rest of nature" to control population density. In some areas (e.g. southwest) the land simply cannot support the density of deer population required for the disease to gain a good foothold in the deer population. In other areas human hunting is what's holding the deer population density down. Hunting has become a lot less popular since the 1950s and 1960s and the available places to do it has also dwindled so once CWD gets in it rapidly expands among the local population. See for example the massive red blotches on the map in the Chicago and DMV areas, places nobody is hunting deer so they're free to breed up to whatever population density the environment can support, a density high enough to permit the spread of a prions disease.

Assuming the current path I would expect to see CWD spread throughout most of the more heavily (deer) populated parts of the US and infect whatever % of the deer population it can given the local population density. There's a lot of untapped potential on the east coast.

CWD is part of that rest of nature, I guess.

In other areas human hunting is what's holding the deer population density down. Hunting has become a lot less popular since the 1950s and 1960s and the available places to do it has also dwindled so once CWD gets in it rapidly expands among the local population.

In that case, legislation which seems primarily crafted to annoy and alienate gun owners might have the unexpected consequence of increasing the spread of CWD.

My dog likes to roll around in deer excrement (well any poop she can find actually). I would imagine prion shredding is rampant in that stuff, right?

>which cause the brain cells of an infected animal to fold improperly and clump together

It causes proteins in the brain to fold improperly and clump together, not brain cells.

We need more wolves and less suburbs. Or at least more hunters.

Deer are out of control. They're being chased out out every development around here.

In the midlights, they commute to all the business parks. I guess for the lawns around the office buildings.

There's tons of them, and they don't all look so good. I imagine they're facing trash, exhaust, and fertilizer, all day every day.

We have too many little developments and too few predators.

Terrifying. Knowing nothing about this at all, I am curious if insects that feed on blood like ticks or mosquitoes can carry or transmit CWD.

Also curious how it is transmitted through vegetation. The article mentions that's how deer spread it to each other, but deer are also constantly raiding human crops as well.

The "Spiroplasma triggering cascade of prions" theory from Frank Bastian is pretty interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O._Bastian

Hmm, it looks like he is going to drop his institutional affiliation entirely when he moves to New Orleans.

CWD is a big deal here in Wisconsin. From what I've read, one factor in spreading the disease is when people put out salt and feed to attract deer. This causes the deer to congregate together and increase the chance of it spreading from one deer to another. There are kill zones within miles of my house where they're trying to eradicate the entire deer population.

That's the scenario for 'A train to Busan'...just saying...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hKlqRd0X7A

I wonder if the increase in cwd is exacerbated by a lack of predation and a decrease in the ability to migrate long distances. Migration by non-fliers is severely constrained these days.

Isn't this only communicable if you eat or handle the brains of the infected animals? How does a disease that only attacks the brain wind up in the feces or other excreta?

I once ate deer meat in Sweden. Do you know if deer populations in Scandinavia are infected as well? Should I be worried?

Did you read the article?

>It's been reported in 24 US states so far, as well as Canada, Norway, Finland, and South Korea.

But to answer your question: No.

0 known human cases, only possible in theory. Read the article for more info ;)

> cooking temperatures are not nearly high enough to kill prions

Are prions alive in that sense? Can you kill a protein?

Kill, deactivate, denature, disable capacity for reproduction, whatever.

I've read that sterilizing surgical equipment will not remove human prions from the equipment, so they can be passed on to the next person that is operated on by that equipment. Apparently they are nearly impossible to remove without destroying the equipment.

No. They’re basically misfolded proteins that tend to cause other proteins they touch to become similarly misfolded through mechanisms we don’t well understand (or at least, I don’t understand). They’re not alive. You can denature them, which more or less means destroying them. But destroying things tends to be harder than killing things.

Prion disease is terrifying and probably under-studied and under-prepared-for...

It is terrifying certainly but I am not sure about understudied. We have studied them and found it just pretty lacking in countermeasures for deformed proteins - including avoidance because they are hard to detect. The whole field is hard.

Theoretically better protein understanding may allow for lack of better words "antigens" which bind to prions to make something harmless while not acting like prions in themselves but that would be one very big computational space and would call for a vast array to compare.

> prions in an infected deer's feces could bind to soil taken up by plants, spread to its leaves, then infect another deer that eats the leaves

How persistent are these things in nature? If there is selection pressure, they could be subject—unlike e.g. cancer—to evolution.

is "zombie deer virus" a new term? I've known about CWD (and CJD, mad cow, and scrapie) for a long time but this is the first time I've heard it referred to as zombie deer virus.

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