WSJ.  This is a very scary report.  "Mad Deer" or chronic wasting disease (CWD) has scientists baffled.  Deer and Elk infected with prions, the cause of Mad Cow disease, have spread throughout the US and Canada.  This infection is using a vector unknown to scientists and seems to spread like a flu (in contrast, livestock feed was the source of "Mad Cow" problem). 

>>>Some laboratory studies suggest CWD could theoretically infect people. Byron Caughey, a prion researcher at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Mont., found that CWD prions could convert human prion proteins to their deadly form in a lab dish. However, the efficiency of such "conversion" was extremely low, evidence of a substantial species barrier.<<<

A prion is a protien with no genetic information that can't be easily destroyed like bacteria and viruses (it is resistant to radiation, high heat, and disinfectants). When it comes into contact with a brain of the species it is harmful to, it bends active biological protiens into replicas of itself, causing lessions and eventually death.  There is no known cure.  The combination of this new active vector of transmission, its ability to leap species boundaries, its small size, and its resistance to all known treatments-decontanimation could mean that this will be our first nano-plague. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
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