Mad deer disease (chronic wasting syndrome) may be spread by saliva
Snippets: Deer probably spread a brain-destroying illness called chronic wasting disease through their saliva, concludes a study that finally pins down a long-suspected culprit.
Proving that saliva is able to spread CWD is important, so that scientists next can determine exactly how that happens in the wild, said Richard T. Johnson, a Johns Hopkins University neurology professor who headed a major report on prion science.
"You can move deer out of a pasture, put other deer into the pasture, and they'll come down with the disease. It's not even casual contact, it's contact with the pasture," Johnson said. "It must be something in their secretions."
Is it spread through shared salt licks? Or by drooling onto grass or into streams? Studying environmental contamination by infectious proteins, called prions, that cause CWD is among Hoover's next steps.
"It's very likely they could be shedding a lot of saliva" shortly before death, noted Richard Race, a veterinarian who studies CWD at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratories. "Saliva's a good bet."
Oh dear.
Keep those deer out of the garden.