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Researchers: Wolves Might Slow Spread of CWD
William G. Davis writes "According to this AP article, researchers are now suggesting that wolves might be able to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer. Chronic wasting disease is the name commonly given to spongiform encephalopathy (prion disease) in deer and elk (basically, mad cow disease in deer). The article explains how wolves typically look for weaknesses in their prey, and since prion disease causes that, wolves might target the sick animals. One has to wonder, though, about the potential ramifications of having dangerous predators exposed to this brain-wasting illness, and what type of 'unusual behavior' they'll start to exhibit."
hmmmmmm... Exctasy-eating wolves in a techno party.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
One has to wonder, though, about the potential ramifications of having dangerous predators exposed to this brain-wasting illness, and what type of 'unusual behavior' they'll start to exhibit.
No need to wonder, just look at Cheney and Rumsfeld. It's a textbook case.
Wolves aren't particularly dangerous. They rarely attack humans... rarely ENCOUNTER humans for that matter, and being at the top of the food chain, wouldn't be in much of a position to pass the virus (virii?) on to other species. I'd guess any wolf that began to have symptoms of such a serious disease would simply starve to death in fairly short order.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Had the submitter actually read up on CWD, they'd have learned that it's already present in areas where there are wild wolves, and that there's no sign of the wolf population contracting it.
As well, in tests that involved feeding infected brains to live stock, none of the livestock showed any signs of contracting CWD. The only time they've had sucess with transmitting the disease outside of deer and elk is by atricicial means, as in, directly injecting it into the brain.
So the wolves should be safe enough.
I had understood that "Mad Cow" is only transmitted by eating the brains of an infected animal. Ranched cattle would acquire it as they are sometimes feed the brains of previously slaughtered cattle, but how exactly do deer and other wildlife transmit it?
Is there another transmission vector, or do deer etc in fact eat the brains of their own dead?
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$tar -xvf
Was just talking about this with a coworker (who keeps track of this kind of thing - he's more of a "commodities geek")on Wednesday.
Sounded like people link these two diseases is that the end result looks the same. Chronic wasting disease is a muscle problem, Mad Cow disease is a deterioration of the brain. Both end up the same with a weak animal that can't walk.
Chronic Wasting disease is probably more of a problem brought on by the overpopulation of deer in the upper midwest than anything. Wolves (and other predators) will benefit until the deer are brought into a more sane population - then they'll turn on people.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Whoever posted this is an idiot.
Fact: Any Predator will zero in on weak prey.
Fact: Wolves are not particularly dangerous to humans.
Fact: Wolves have been exposed to more mind altering diseases than CWD, ie. Rabies for much longer than we have even known about CWD, much less tracked it.
Fact: CWD does not cause the animals to go "MAD" or attack others.
David Mech, a biologist with the U.S. Geologic Survey and a wolf expert, cautioned that until wolves and wasting disease actually interact, theories about wolves controlling the spread of the disease are just speculation.
Wolves aren't really so much "dangerous predators" as "your basic carnivores in the wild." They're not going to attack humans unless their other food options are totally depleted and they're starving.
/. is just wrong, and I'd encourage whoever is responsible to go to a site like www.defenders.org and donate a but of money to try to push the tide of public opinion back away from myth and towards truth.
Mad Wolf Disease would not cause this situation so much as make the wolf infirm and eventually dead. You're not going to have sudden blood-lusted and violent wolves. You're going to have very dead wolves who can't function.
Meanwhile, absurd paranoia like this will lead to an incrase in programs like the one they're trying really hard to put into place in Alaska, whereby they will slaughter all wolves in a given area with a 100 mile radius. By shooting them from helicopters. And sometimes, by chasing them via helicopter to the point of exhaustion, and then shooting them. Because apparently the helicopter and machine gun aren't enough on their own.
Short form - the "wolves are dangerous" myth is both ignorant and destructive, and whoever submitted this article (As well as whoever approved it) should be ashamed - spreading crap like this on as widely read a site as
Philip Sandifer's academic website
-from what I remember reading in some not-so-recent Scientific American, a scavenger's immune system wouldn't help protect against rogue prions, because they're neither virus nor bacteria. A scavenger, if it incorporated these same prions into their own bodies, could possibly also be at risk for mad foo disease.
The book Mad Cow USA is now a free download (PDF). It's the entire book with 245 pages.
No primates are vegetarians. Don't do that.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
"Wasting disease makes its victims distracted and unwary as it eats tiny holes in their brains, the Denver Post reported"
I think that clears that up.
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a transmissible neurological disease of deer and elk that produces small lesions in brains of infected animals. It is characterized by loss of body condition, behavioral abnormalities and death. CWD is classified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), and is similar to mad cow disease in cattle and scrapie in sheep.
Mad Cow is transmitted by eating the brains of infected animals- in contrast to eating other parts of infected animals. Google "prions" Apparently, they are neither bacteriological nor viral. It seems prions may be active in soil, maybe even water? There's very little known about prions, but I think they remain active long after the brain tissue has decomposed.
... is how researchers have propagated the disease. In fact, the transmission means is unknown in part because we don't yet know the agent (as explained here). So, as in so many things, that the wolves might get and propagate the disease is just wild-assed FUD.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Had the parent RTFA, they'd have read that CWD has not been found in areas near wolves, and that's why nobody knows what's going to happen. To quote:
No one has been able to study whether wolves single out CWD-infected animals because the range of predator and disease have never overlapped.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
> One has to wonder, though, about the
> potential ramifications of having dangerous
> predators exposed to this brain-wasting
> illness, and what type of 'unusual behavior'
> they'll start to exhibit."
Dogs (including wolves), horses, and rabbits
are notably resistant to TSE prion diseases.
Nobody knows why, yet.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
up here in Idaho, farmers and herders generally hate wolves. they'd hunt wolves into extinction if it were up to them.
this is one of the arguments in favor of the 7 main Idaho packs and numerous Yellowstone packs that could protect them.
there are also a lot of hunters here that would rather have untainted game. letting the packs run wild, as they should be, could very well help hunting in this state, rather than hurt it as the farmers would have you believe.
(sadly enough, the farmers' 3 main arguments are that wolves kill all livestock, attck humans, and destroy the game population. everyone knows wolves don't normally attack humans, that they help control the game population rather than diminish it - not to mention weeding out the sick and feeble, and rarely attack livestock - i'd hardly call 6 dead calves the end of the world. bad, yes. end of the world, no.)
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Experience suggests that they will probably do something like launch a series of groundless IP lawsuits against the open source community.
They have isolated multiple anti-bacterial compounds and hopefully they will be able to make incredibly powerful new antibiotics available in a few years.
Yeah, but some incredibly powerful antibiotic that a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) can handle may be quite deadly to us humans... Komodo dragons aren't all that closely related to us, you know (for one, they're cold-blooded).
if you incinerate a mad foo sheep to ash, and feed the ash to other sheep you get more mad foo sheep. Moderate radiation doesn't help either. So if something has protines similar enough, and thermodynamically less stable than our nasty brain eating molecule but is unable to destroy bad copies, it's bad times as the prions just persist. Getting into water, or onto something that is suitibly tasty for another animal.
Wolves being mammals an all, and probably closer to humans than say deer, I wouldn't call myself overly optimistic.
CWD is prevalent in ranching areas. I theorize that the deer and elk are eating livestock feed on occasion when the opportunity presents itself - a very common occurance.
Keep in mind that chicken and pork feed use ground up animal protein, including brains of down animals. All approved by the USDA. It is just cattle feed that is not supposed to contain animal protein. In fact in the Washington casem, i would bet that the cow in question at one time dined on swine feed.
Large numbers of dear and elk contact the disease simply because they live long enough for the disease to manifest itself (3 - 5 years)
Comforting is it not?
A friend of my married into a rich family that owned a good sized island (somewhere in the NE us, won't be more specific).
The deer and rodents were completely out of control. IT was great for deer hunting, but everyone in the family contracted Lyme disease. The ticks there were unbelievable.
Then the western coyote made to that region of the country and swam to the island (an impressive feat). In one season they reduced the deer herd to a manageable size and then turned to the voles and other small rodents. Result: ticks are now in check along with Lyme disease.
The lesson here is that without top level predators, prey populations rise until they are checked by starvation on one hand, or parasites and diseases on the other.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And there's lots of literature supporting the idea that predators and scavengers tend to have very good defenses against the diseases that affect their prey. Part of the defenses are powerful digestive systems that leave few cells intact and chop up most proteins and DNA into small pieces. They also have some of the best immune systems on the planet.
You can have the strongest immune system of any known mammal or bird and it will not protect you from prion diseases like spongiform encephalopathies. There is no foreign protein (except for the prion particle that you originally got infected from years ago), just a lot of funny-folded native protein. So what? As amyloid plaques build up in your brain, your immune system has nothing to attack. An infected animal's body can be riddled with prions at death and you will not find a single antibody to them anywhere since they pass the self/non-self test. In fact, to get antibodies, people need to inject massive quantities of prion particles into unrelated animals, whose immune systems will react in the same way they do with any foreign protein.
A strong digestive system doesn't seem to be much help either, as the prion form of the protein is extremely resistant to attack from proteases.
There are many versions of the prion gene, and not all of them are equally prone to malicious folding. Wolves with prion genes whose PrP proteins fold easily into the beta-pleated-sheet prion tend to die after eating lots of prions. Surviving wolves gobble prions and suffer no adverse consequences since their native protein is resistant to the altered conformation. So the wolf is probably OK, because of the selection pressure that has been applied to it.
But you'd think the same thing about cats, and cats get the disease easily. But in fact, it is highly likely that all wolves are immune to transmissable spongiform encephalopathies judging by the mere fact that nobody has ever succeeded in infecting a dog with any sort of TSE. Even when they plonk highly infectious prion material directly into a dog's brain, no TSE develops. TSE of one flavor or another has been successfully transmitted to goats, sheep, monkeys, pigs, mink, cattle, cats, and zoo animals of all types that ate prion-contaminated feed. Never to any breed of dog (or wolf, same thing).
When BSE broke out in England, a number of human victims (who all ate beef) came down with CJD. It was called "new variant" CJD ("nvCJD") because it turned out not to be CJD at all, which attacks the cerebral cortex, but is in fact a closely related disease: the human form of BSE, which attacks the brainstem just like it does in cattle. A prion researcher tried to transmit BSE from cows to transgenic mice which had a human prion gene, via brain injections (the foolproof way to get it- feeding is much less effective). This experiment was eventually watched closely by the British food industry as the mice survived past 300 and 400 days. But meanwhile, study of the first ten victims of nvCJD in Britain showed that all were homozygous for methionine at codon 129. About 38 percent of the human population fits this profile. The mice (which never showed any signs of illness) had a human prion gene that was homozygous for valine, not methionine, at codon 129. So while this is a transmissable disease, susceptibility is genetically determined.
"One has to wonder, though, about the potential ramifications of having dangerous predators exposed to this brain-wasting illness, and what type of 'unusual behavior' they'll start to exhibit."
was.. WEREWOLVES! Run for the hills! ;)
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.