‘Zombie deer disease’ infecting animals in US could spread to humans, scientists fear

“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 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. It has also been found in 800 deer, elk and moose throughout Wyoming.

“We’re dealing with a disease that is invariably fatal, incurable and highly contagious,” Dr Cory Anderson, codirector of a CWD programme at the 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,” he said.

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

In 2019, Dr Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota school of public health, said laboratory research suggested it was “probable” that human cases of CWD would occur in future.

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 earlier this month. 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 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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to record any cases of infection in people.