Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a contagious neurological disease that is part of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) disease family - the most notable member of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease.
Unlike BSE, which infects cattle, CWD affects deer, elk and moose.
"It causes a characteristic spongy degeneration of the brains of infected animals resulting in emaciation, abnormal behavior, loss of bodily functions and death," The Chronic Wasting Disease Alliance reports.
1 The symptoms are similar to those of mad cow disease, scrapie (a similar disease found in sheep and goats) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. The infectious agent thought to cause CWD and other TSEs is prions - an infectious type of protein known to cause neurodegeneration.
A human version of mad cow disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), can be caused by eating beef contaminated with brain, spinal cord or other central nervous system tissue from infected cattle.
2 This can occur in ground meat (including hot dogs, bologna, taco fillings and more), as it may become contaminated during the "extraction of the last bits of meat from cow carcasses," the Center for Food Safety stated.
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The question then, as CWD continues to spread across the U.S., is whether this disease may also jump to humans - and the Canadian government has recently issued a warning based on new research suggesting the answer is yes.
Comment: What's in your neighborhood? Biological effects from cellphone tower radiation on humans and animals begin at 3-4 micro-watts. Cellphone towers emit in the range of 1500-2000 MW.