Officials in Nevada are working to keep wild animals with the highly contagious chronic wasting disease (CWD) out of their state.
The term “zombie deer” is used to describe animals who have contracted the disease that reports said can decimate populations of wild deer and elk.
Symptoms of the sickness are lack of fear of humans, lethargy and emaciation, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
“The disease has hit numerous states around the country, including Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming. It’s crept into the eastern portion of Utah, the closest it has gotten to Nevada,” the report said.
The sickness is reportedly transmitted by prions, which are protein particles that have been linked to brain diseases such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
Peregrine Wolff, a Nevada Department of Wildlife veterinarian, said she knows Nevada is not totally immune to the sickness.
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. We know that we can’t wrap Nevada in a bubble,” she commented.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that CWD “can affect animals of all ages and some infected animals may die without ever developing the disease. CWD is fatal to animals and there are no treatments or vaccines.”
However, reports said officials have tested dead animals, and are keeping tabs on migrating deer and elk coming over Nevada’s border from Utah.
This year, Nevada lawmakers “banned bringing certain animal body parts into the state, including the brain and the spinal cord that can contain large concentrations of prions,” according to a Fox News report.
The CDC stated that so far, there have been no reports of any humans becoming infected by the disease, but studies have suggested that CWD poses a risk to non-human primates such as monkeys, who might eat meat or come into contact with fluids from an animal infected by the disease.
“These studies raise concerns that there may also be a risk to people. Since 1997, the World Health Organization has recommended that it is important to keep the agents of all known prion diseases from entering the human food chain,” the CDC concluded.