"Killing reindeer with lightning is good for biodiversity" Topic

Scientist examine the effects of reindeer killed by lighning.

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Brings in scavengers – they drop…droppings…bird droppings are seed rich – bingo: increase in localised plant diversity!

Except for the reindeer diversity, the reindeer population on Hardangervidda suffers from Chronic wasting disease.
There's about 10 000 of them there and they had to kill off sone 3000 of them last winter because of Chronic wasting disease. So 300 is a sizable portion of the population. Especially if the Chronic wasting disease spreads.

Interesting – but presumably there's not a lot anyone can do to stop lightning hitting reindeer?

Kill Thor?
Giant 1000 meter lighting rod.

Gunfreak, Canadian research suggests that isolated Reindeer cannot get a natural cause of CWD. It seems they must be in contact with infected deer and moose populations. It also seems to be transmitted by oral means. Maybe the placements of saltlicks is one of the culprits.

Could Prion induced spongiform encephalopathies such as CWD may infect the humans who eat the deer, reindeer and moose? No cases yet, according to my Google searches.

Yes, the infection most likely came from deer or roe deer, there are way, way too many of them.
Well, they still haven't shown that CWD really can be linked to mad cow. It's assumed based on circumstantial evidence.
But it's not recommended to eat them anyway, and this year they are doing samples of all deer species taken in the hunt(elk, deer and roe deer)

But CWD has been known to be a transmissable spongiform encephalitis (TSE) since 1978. These diseases manifest themselves differently depending on the host animal. But they all demonstrate the isolation of prions.

From the CDC:

cdc.gov/prions/index.html

I'd be nervous in eating them too. Mainly because it can take 2-3 years from transmission to onset of symptoms.

Transmissible yes, but the question remains as to whether to humans -

To date, there have been no reported cases of CWD infection in people. However, animal studies suggest CWD poses a risk to some types of non-human primates, like monkeys, that eat meat from CWD-infected animals or come in contact with brain or body fluids from infected deer or elk. These studies raise concerns that there may also be a risk to people. Since 1997, the World Health Organization has recommended that it is important to keep the agents of all known prion diseases from entering the human food chain.

Agreed, and that is why I wouldn't want to take the risk.

However, there is still a lot that is not known about prion induced diseases. For example, why do the diseases cause different symptoms in different species if the basic mechanism of infection is the same? How similar (or dissimilar) are the "prion proteins" in these different species? Why do some of the diseases cross the species lines such as variant CJD in humans and BSE in cows?

When I was in undergrad, my virology Professor was studying Kuru, a neuromuscular wasting disease mostly confined to the cannibalistic Fore people in New Guinea. The infectious agent made it through micro filters that would filter out normal viruses. Since there was no idea of prions in the 1970's the disease was called a "slow virus". Slowly the medical researchers and the veterinary researchers came to the same conclusion that these were a group of diseases that all has spongiform encephalopathies in common. By the early 1980's, the concept of a prion was postulated.

From a Sci-Am article:

"A major breakthrough occurred when researchers discovered that the infectious agent consists primarily of a protein found in the membranes of normal cells, but in this case the protein has an altered shape, or conformation. Some scientists hypothesized that the distorted protein could bind to other proteins of the same type and induce them to change their conformation as well, producing a chain reaction that propagates the disease and generates new infectious material. Since then, the gene for this protein has been successfully cloned, and studies using transgenic mice have bolstered the prion hypothesis. The evidence in support of the hypothesis is now very strong, though not incontrovertible". (highlights mine)

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