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By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter
(Health Day)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that ticks can harbor transmissible amounts of the protein particle that causes CWD, a fatal neurological disease seen in deer, elk and moose.
The pathogen, the prion, can pass through soil or body fluids, including feces. The prion can cause certain proteins to fold abnormally, especially in the brain. This can prevent these proteins from performing their normal functions.
Over time, the CWD prion can cause severe brain damage and eventual death in deer, the study explained.
While many CWD studies focus on the role of soil in spreading the disease, the researcher Heather Inzalaco was curious about other means of transmission. She is a researcher at the Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, housed in the UW-Madison Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
“Deer live these secret lives; we don’t see everything they do,” Inzalaco said in a university press release.
Inzalaco wondered if one possibility might be ticks. The arachnids acquire blood from CWD-infected deer, but she wondered if they could also harbor the prions.
“Deer will groom each other to get places they can’t reach on their own through self-grooming,” Inzalaco said. “If they groom each other and they do it to eliminate ectoparasites [such as ticks]this could be problematic as they probably eat the ectoparasites.
Inzalaco determined in the lab that ticks could carry prions in their blood meal and that they could carry enough agent to infect another animal with CWD.
Next, she partnered with the state Department of Natural Resources to study ticks taken from deer that hunters harvested and tested for CWD. Of the 176 deer with ticks studied, 15 tested positive for CWD.
Inzalaco determined that wild ticks also carried transmissible levels of prions, making them potential mechanical vectors of disease.
“They’re just like a little CWD ‘tick-tock’ that maybe eaten by deer,” Inzalaco said.
The study went no further to verify whether prion-carrying ticks caused transmission to other deer.
Understanding the spread can help improve disease management. It’s not practical to treat all wild deer with tick preventatives, but Inzalaco thinks better land stewardship could help manage tick populations.
This could include the presence of contiguous habitat of native plant communities and appropriate management of areas to continue a natural fire regime. This has been shown to limit tick populations, she said. When ecosystems have lots of invasive plants, ticks proliferate.
The results of the study were published online recently in the journal Nature.
SOURCE: University of Wisconsin-Madison, press release, July 7, 2023
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