"I’ve never seen a flying squirrel in Ohio in 40 or so years of living in Ohio"
- You all remember BSE (Mad Cow Disease) ?
- Only six cows with BSE have been found in the U.S. There were hundreds in Europe (incl. Switzerland).
- People can get a variant of BSE called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
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There have been more cases of vCJD in the US than can be explained via cow BSE.
- There was an article in the Lancet once correlating vCJD with the eating of squirrel brains.
Maybe flying squirrels taste better ?
Than explained by the number of cows PID'd with BSE, but service personnel stationed in the EU during the timeframe are barred from donating blood, due to the risk of possibly having consumed contaminated beef while stationed in the EU (and the fact that the prions/misfolded proteins, once consumed, remain in the body with the potential to cause Spongiform Encephalopathy many years or even decades later).
It's what worries me about CWD in cervids. It's caused by the same mechanism, i.e. prions/misfolded proteins.
BSE is now commonly accepted to have transferred from sheep with Scrapie (sheep form of SE), because UK farmers would feed sheep meat/bone meal to the cows as a cheap nutritional supplement.
Prions are scary, because they're just misfolded proteins. Because they aren't 'alive' they're extremely difficult to destroy.
To date, there isn't a confirmed case of vCJD attributed to CWD (that I'm aware of), but therein lies the problem; SE is caused by prions inducing/triggering a cascade of proteins misfolding in the host's body (and with BSE and vCJD, this can happen decades after consuming the affected beef products). Can we be sure that none of the vCJD cases in the US are related to CWD?
When BSE first popped up, we heard the same claims, "No evidence that consuming BSE beef has any proven ill effects in humans". Until vCJD.
What's even scarier is that we're now pretty sure that BSE was a species jump from sheep prions. Infected animals leave these prions in body fluids (saliva, blood, waste). The prions can endure in the environment for a long time and can be absorbed by the roots of plants, and be transported to the leaves/shoots. In the case of CWD, any cervid consuming these prion contaminated plants, can develop CWD.
They attempted to decontaminate a cervid farm in CO, going to the extent of removing the top soil, salting the whole area and covering it with new top soil, trucked in. Cervids reintroduced to the area quickly developed CWD.
If misfolded prions can cause SE in other species, and CWD infected cervids leave areas contaminated with prions, and other animals eat the plants, what are the possible ramifications? CWD infected deer wander and graze in areas that our cattle and sheep do.
