Medical researchers say they developed a vaccination against chronic wasting disease in deer, a fatal brain infection similar to mad cow disease that affects deer, elk, caribou and moose. The study, involving a small number of deer, holds promise of a shield against the disease in U.S. livestock herds and prevention of Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other diseases in humans caused by mal-formed proteins known as prions, says the NYU Langone Medical Center, which led in the study.
According to the researchers, if further vaccine experiments prove successful, vaccination of a small portion of a herd could provide enough immunity to prevent infection of the herd. For the study, five deer were given the trial vaccine. It was more than two years before four of them to become infected. One deer has remained disease-free. The trial vaccine used a prion-like protein that was inserted into the genome of a weakened salmonella bacterium. The bacterium was used because it easily enters the gut and mimics the most common mode of infection, ingestion of food or feces contaminated with prions.