This may be the first case in which humans contracted such a disease from an animal.
A rare prion disease killed two hunters in the United States, reports IFLScience. Experts fear that the disease known as zombie deer disease, CWD, may be responsible for the incident.
Prions are proteins with a defective structure that can cause dangerous diseases in their host.
Prion diseases are very scary: they can be caught, they cannot be treated and they always end in death.
These diseases typically threaten the brain, where tiny holes form as a result of prions. As a result, patients may experience a number of physical and mental symptoms, including hallucinations, aggression, depression, confusion, memory loss, and movement and speech difficulties.
Among other things, prions cause Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which has infected hundreds of deer in North America in recent years. CWD in animals is associated with, among other things, drastic weight loss, a stumbling gait, and abnormal behavior.
If the death of the two hunters was also caused by this disease, then this could be the first case in which humans contracted CWD. One of them – a 72-year-old man – started to notice strange symptoms in 2022, he suddenly became confused and aggressive. As it turned out later, they both consumed the meat of a deer that was infected with CWD.
Both men later died, and during their autopsies, a prion disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) was discovered in their bodies. Experts believe that it is possible that prions could have passed from the venison into the bodies of the hunters, which later caused the disease.
Scientists are not yet sure whether the transfer of prions between animals and humans is really possible, but in the light of the current case, they have to take this possibility into account.
