\nGabriel Mendes \/ iStock<\/p>\n
In fact, speaking with Texas Parks and Wildlife veterinarian J. Hunter Reed, DVM, MPH, the researchers learned that from 2021 to 2025, Texas ranches that were later confirmed to have housed CWD-positive deer shipped hundreds of live white-tailed deer to Mexico, potentially seeding the disease there. CWD can take years to cause symptoms, and prions can persist in the environment for well more than a decade.<\/p>\n
That finding begs the question of whether the bats can be infected with certain CWD strains and, if so, if prion characteristics change after passage through the mammals, possibly gaining the ability to infect non-cervid species such as livestock, wildlife, or people.<\/p>\n
That scenario is alarming to Brent Race, DVM, scientist at the National Institutes of Health\u2019s Rocky Mountain Laboratories.\u00a0\u201cThis is a speculative concern, but it turns into a nightmare if it’s real,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cTheir opinion that bats may become a vector for CWD, or even worse, that bats may enhance the host range of CWD, warrants further study.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even if vampire bats aren\u2019t susceptible to infection with CWD prions, they could still serve as a disease\u00a0vector to susceptible species, he said.<\/p>\n
Race added that prion mutations are hard to easily describe.\u00a0\u201cThe prion doesn\u2019t really mutate like a virus or bacteria that can change their genome,\u201d he said. \u201cPrions change by misfolding slightly differently.\u00a0It is possible that if bats were susceptible to CWD, the resulting prion may be folded differently than typical CWD and potentially have an enhanced ability to infect other species, including humans and livestock.\u00a0This is, of course, very speculative.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nGabriel Mendes \/ iStock<\/p>\n
Rodrigo Morales, PhD, of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, said that the study is interesting and important but\u00a0still preliminary\/hypothetical and\u00a0didn\u2019t provide enough evidence to\u00a0raise\u00a0alarm.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs written in the article, this is something still hypothetical because there isn\u2019t a very clear\u00a0or frequent interaction\u00a0between the infected animals [deer] and the vampire bats they are referring to,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cUnfortunately,\u00a0there are no models yet suggesting that this could happen.\u00a0For that reason, interpretations need to be weighed with caution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morales said that\u00a0if bats and CWD deer do actually interact, there would be reason for concern. But\u00a0the level of prion\u00a0infectivity\u00a0in blood is very low, and the bats would likely break down some of them after passing them through their gastrointestinal tract.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we take an infected animal and collect the blood, we may detect it, but that doesn’t mean that the amount of prions present in blood will be enough to transmit the disease,\u201d he said. \u201cAlong this line, multiple factors, and not purely interaction, must be considered when evaluating potential vectors for disease transmission. Nevertheless, investigation in these and other areas are relevant to either confirm or discount events facilitating CWD dissemination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Need for ecological studies, experiments, surveillance<\/p>\n
The authors strongly recommended conducting risk assessments. \u201cThese assessments should include ecological studies, prion transmission experiments, and surveillance in regions where\u00a0Desmodus\u00a0and CWD-positive cervids are likely to overlap,\u201d they wrote. \u201cAddressing this emerging issue proactively will be essential to mitigate future risks to wildlife and livestock health, related economies, and public health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conducting these types of assessments is a massive undertaking, Race said. \u201cAnd then if you start talking about looking at large animal species, it’s even more difficult to do,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they probably would have to do a lot of it in mice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Addressing this emerging issue proactively will be essential to mitigate future risks to wildlife and livestock health, related economies, and public health.<\/p>\n
Another factor hindering research is the apparent lack of CWD surveillance in Mexico, which is the only way to determine the risk.<\/p>\n
Larsen called for the US Department of Agriculture to consider this mode of CWD transmission. \u201cWe know that some percentage of pigs and cattle are susceptible to CWD prions,\u201d he said. \u201cWe also know that sheep and goats are susceptible. But if the vampire bats develop their own [susceptibility], we have no idea what the species boundaries of those prions are.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the meantime, MNPRO has launched a wildlife surveillance project in which it is working with a few veterinary diagnostic labs where wildlife are turned in for rabies surveillance, hoping to identify any CWD prions in those animals. As an example, Larsen cited a camel prion disease circulating in northern Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was discovered because the animals were being turned in for rabies testing, because they were exhibiting symptoms that the veterinarians thought were similar to rabies,\u201d he said. \u201cBut all the rabies tests came back negative. And it turned out that there was a prion disease.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In fact, speaking with Texas Parks and Wildlife veterinarian J. Hunter Reed, DVM, MPH, the researchers learned that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-575178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}