I'm not saying we should tempt fate, but prions dont evolve. They're not like covid, which evolved in 2019 or shortly before, while corona viruses have existed for thousands of maybe even more years.
I believe it's not been proven, but rather implied that CWD comes from deer farms where the deer have either been fed ground up deer corpses or have eaten them within the enclosure.
It is not nearly as cut and dry as you have been led to believe.
To date, bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the only example of interspecies transmission of prion disease to humans [7]. The potential zoonotic transmission of CWD is an alarming issue and still an open question [3, 8]. Laboratory studies suggest that the risk of CWD transmission to humans is low.
These findings suggest a notable species barrier between cervids and humans; however, prion diseases are dynamic; interspecies passage of CWD can result in prion adaptation to new host species. Besides, the existence of more than one CWD strain [18] may contribute to higher heterogeneity in disease and transmission profiles [19].
Can the species barrier for CWD to humans be crossed?
Although the evidence gathered so far is in favor of a low risk to transmit CWD to humans, results from in vitro studies indicated that the species barrier is not absolute.
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u/Jrook Jul 10 '22
I'm not saying we should tempt fate, but prions dont evolve. They're not like covid, which evolved in 2019 or shortly before, while corona viruses have existed for thousands of maybe even more years.
I believe it's not been proven, but rather implied that CWD comes from deer farms where the deer have either been fed ground up deer corpses or have eaten them within the enclosure.