Zombie Deer Virus: List Of States Where It Could Affect Humans

A "zombie deer" virus has the Western States looking out for the very real possibility that the disease, which affects mostly deers, elks, and moose, can also affect humans. Known as chronic wasting diseases (CWD), the virus causes affected animals to lose weight, become listless, aggressive, drool, and wander aimlessly around the forest -- exactly the way zombies are portrayed in horror movies.

What’s worse about the zombie deer virus is that it’s an incurable prion disease. According to an sources, prions are "misfolded" proteins that have no known treatments or cures. If an organism gets affected, it will suffer agonizing months of slowly losing body functions and could eventually lead to death.

Per the University of Minnesota, the government should already be taking action and finding ways to stop the spread of the virus. “It is my best professional judgment based on my public health experience and the risk of BSE transmission to humans in the 1980s and 1990s...human cases of CWD associated with the consumption of contaminated meat will be documented in the years ahead,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention.

Osterholm is known to be one of the experts who sat among the British review panel at the time of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy scare, better known as mad cow disease. He predicted that prions could infect humans if they eat tainted meat or simply get in contact with infected tissue.

The university is currently investigating as well if the disease can leap across different mammal species, citing other diseases similar to CWD like Creutzfeldt-Jakob or CJD, which infected three deer hunters during the 1990s.

This scare has raised alarm among 24 States, with public health officials and infectious disease researchers warning hunters about CWD. In a statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hunters must first consider factors before deciding to eat meat from deer and elk hunted from areas with known CWD cases. The best way to do this is to check state wildlife and public health guidance to see a state or region has a relatively safe environment from CWD.