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Prion Disease can Spread Through Faeces of Deer: Study
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.
Over the course of months, the investigators collected the faeces of five mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and then orally infected them with CWD prions.
They continued taking samples until the animals died or developed signs of the disease and were euthanised.
Faecal samples -- irradiated to kill germs and viruses but leave the prions untouched -- were injected into the brains of genetically modified mice.
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