Original title: "Zombie Deer" disease has a very low probability of infecting people
Recently, some media reported that a deadly infectious disease called "Zombie Deer" disease is spreading rapidly in the United States. In the report, some experts said that the next target of this infectious disease, which makes deer look like zombies, is likely to be humans. As soon as the news came out, the people who did not know the truth could not help but take a breath, which was also too horrible. Is that really the case?
Like "mad cow disease", it is a prion disease
"Zombie deer disease, whose name is unknown, is still very impressive." On the 20th, Professor Dong Xiaoping, director of the Global Public Health Center of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, deputy director of the National Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, and director of the prion ward of the Virus Disease Institute, said in an interview with the reporter of Science and Technology Daily that its essence is a chronic consumptive disease of deer, Like "mad cow disease" and human Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, it belongs to a kind of prion disease, just as influenza can be divided into bird flu, swine flu and human flu. This kind of disease was first reported in the United States in 1967. Up to now, this kind of disease has appeared in 24 states in the United States and 3 provinces in Canada. Since this century, South Korea and Norway have also had relevant reports.
Dong Xiaoping introduced that prion is the old name of protein. Strictly speaking, prion is not a virus in the traditional sense, but a self replicating and infectious factor composed of protein only without nucleic acid, which mainly damages the central nervous system. Take deer for example, it will damage the brain and spinal cord of deer. The symptoms are obvious emaciation, body hair loss, ataxia, that is, lack of coordination, unstable walking, behavior change, etc., and the sick deer eventually dies.
"The main manifestation of human prion disease is progressive dementia, which will lead to the rapid decline of cognitive, computational, thinking, memory and other abilities of the sick people, accompanied by motor and sensory disorders, and even some mental symptoms." Dong Xiaoping said that the mortality rate of this disease is 100% for both animals and people, At present, there is no effective specific treatment and prevention method.
The species barrier effect has a very low probability of human infection
In the above report, Michael Osterhold, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned that the disease was likely to infect humans in the future.
In this regard, Dong Xiaoping said that from an epidemiological point of view, there is no case of a person related to "zombie deer", and there is no data showing that it will infect people, or that it has no evidence to prove its ability to infect people. "The main reason is that it has species barrier effect."
Dong Xiaoping said that many viruses have a limited host range, and the species barrier may depend on whether the host cells have corresponding receptors. For example, the receptors of poliovirus only exist in humans and primates, so other animals have natural species resistance. Generally speaking, just like bird flu mostly spreads among birds, swine flu only infects pigs.
From an experimental point of view, in the laboratory, the researchers took the transgenic mice with human prion protein as the research object, and found that the existing deer prion virus strains could hardly form infection. This also reflects from another aspect that the deer prion is different from the virus strain from "mad cow disease", and the probability of infecting humans is very low. In addition, since the end of last century, China has not found any wild or raised deer infected with BSE in its surveillance.
Data shows that at present, 15000 infected deer are eaten every year, and this number is expected to increase by 20% every year.
The CDC also said that the most likely way for humans to be infected is to eat infected meat. Some experts compared this event with the "mad cow disease" that swept the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, which caused more than 220 deaths. In this regard, Dong Xiaoping believes that unlike "mad cow disease", beef accounts for a large proportion of meat consumed by humans, but the consumption of deer meat is still relatively limited.
"However, although there is no evidence that deer prion virus strains can infect humans, it is not completely ruled out that human consumption of deer meat has led to individual incidents of infection with this disease. The spread of this disease in the United States should arouse the attention of scientists, doctors and animal doctors all over the world. It is imperative to monitor, prevent and control deer prion diseases, increase research on deer prion diseases, especially research on cross species infection of human beings, and scientifically evaluate the possibility of human infection. " Dong Xiaoping stressed. Ordinary people should also do a good job of personal protection. They should not eat deer meat food that has not been quarantined, let alone food from sick or dead deer. (Fu Lili)
(Editor in charge: Zhu Chuange, He Yingchun)
