The link is not 100% but two hunters eating from the same deer population and falling ill at around the same time is extremely unlikely to be a coincidence.
We are essentially one mutation away from this spreading between humans and that would be very, very bad.
It's going to be in the soil for a very long time 
Hope the prion uptake from eating contaminated plants isn't too frequent
Lol whoops...fixed now. No idea how that happened but I do fondly remember those cops getting their asses kicked.
True that it's not a virus but prions can mutate in the sense that they are just proteins like any other, produced according to their genes. The gene coding for the prion protein can mutate, producing a prion that is better at making, e.g., the human analog fold into a prion.
sure the coding gene can mutate but there's no feedback mechanism to make this more likely as the disease spreads like with a virus.
They aren't produced according the their genes. They don't affect DNA like viruses do. They are a removed lower energy configuration of a protein. When the removed protein bumps into a healthy form of itself, the forces between the molecules pull the healthy protein into the prion shape. Then they go their separate ways, exponentially eating holes through tissues.
The protein targeted by CWD is different in cervids, it has like an extra loop that is important for its function. So if a CWD prion bumps into the human version of the protein, nothing happens. But, if some weird interaction allowed it to actually work, it's feasible a human prion could be created.
Prions are just proteins that can fold in a way that self-propagates by causing other instances of the same (or very similar) protein to also misfold the same way. This is how they cause infectious disease. The downstream impacts vary because it depends on what the misfolded protein actually does in addition to helping other instances misfold. Most often it just accumulates, avoiding destruction by the cell's usual mechanisms of destroying misfolded proteins (most prions that can't avoid this would be destroyed before we could even notice their existence). But even just accumulating a bunch of a prion can be devastating, as their mass can be disruptive and the actual functional amount of the normally folded protein becomes effectively nil.
But like all proteins, they are indeed still produced according to their genes. Proteins are generated through the transcription and translation processes.
Prions are the best candidate IMO for a near-to-medium-term human extinction event. If a bad one gets a foothold then median human life expectancy will be like 12 years within a century or two and there'll be nothing to be done about it
You should probably be scareder of CWD and similar diseases TBQH IMHO PBJ
It's everywhere by now, isn't it? When the containment of a new disease is precarious like this, I usually assume the worst has already happened. The people in charge just aren't aware of it yet. If they are, they still don't want to tell the public out of fear of how destabilizing such news could be to the whole system.
The maps of affected wild herds only shows a few states, but I've seen deer here in NJ as far back as a decade ago that very much looked like they were sick with CWD. I wouldn't doubt that it's more widespread than we are aware of.
With so many possibilities of deer and cattle coming into contact in rural settings, I especially worry about my relatives that have cattle and occasionally hunt. I guess my mother had a point about never wanting to try any venison that they cooked.
Wait, that deer population has been known to have CWD and they were still like "hey, i guess these are good to eat"? tf is wrong with carnists?
I mean this isn't even a carnist thing in as much as this is just a "MUH RIGHT TO PUT MYSELF AND ALL OF HUMANITY AT MASSIVE RISK" thing
a "MUH RIGHT TO PUT MYSELF AND ALL OF HUMANITY AT MASSIVE RISK" thing
so a carnist thing basically
i am suddenly getting a very detailed idea of how these people behaved during the lockdowns
It's a certain protein that got misfolded, if it comes in contact with more of the original protein it causes that to also get misfolded. It can spread kinda similarly to a virus, via bodily fluids, animal-animal contact, in contaminated food/water, and by eating tainted meat in this case. Even if the deer was asymptomatic they can still spread the disease. The way the protein is folded causes it to be resistant to degradation so it can lay dormant for years or maybe decades in the environment. It causes horrifying symptoms causing deer to almost turn into zombies as their bodies waste away.
Yeah it's not something to fuck with but we keep forcing factory farmed animals to eat animal by-products/waste, and overcrowd/stress wild animal populations.
It's a prion, aka a protein which has gone wrong
The worst part about CWD is that it can sit in soil for a decade so once an area gets CWD, it will pretty much keep CWD
If anything this just shows how cowardly hunters are. Who tf shoots a clearly diseased animal and then takes it home acting like they shot it on their own merits?
Putting it out of its misery and not wasting what could be good venison meat?
Sounds more merciful than shooting a young healthy animal.
But I don't know, I don't hunt.
If the poor thing's visibly suffering from CWD, it absolutely is not good meat. When I was living in the sticks, I didn't know a single subsistence hunter who'd eat a visibly-diseased buck-- the sport hunters might've still gone after them, but I don't tolerate sport hunters in my physical locality, so I don't talk to them.
I lived in England in the 80s and I’m always terrified that I will find out I have vCJD. It’s believed that symptoms can take decades to show.
why don't they just unfold the wrongly folded proteins and fold it correctly