3 Reasons CWD Is Spreading Faster Than Hunters Realize

yeah that is exciting though right you wouldn't be getting to this point if you didn't have something that you thought could could help with that right so i and i think that gave a good overview of what the project is and maybe just take a step back like jesse said he scott he liked how you were able to break things down and make it make sense to to the average person who might not know as much so for people that are listening what is cwd

So CWD is an entirely new category of infectious disease.

It's a prion disease.

Now, normally when we think about infectious diseases, you think about things like viruses or bacteria.

This is something entirely different.

It's a single protein that can cause infection.

And what's even scarier about it, that single protein is in each and every one of us as we speak.

And right now, hopefully within all of us, it's folded into one particular pattern that allows it to perform valuable functions in terms of copper metabolism and memory formation.

But that same protein can fold into a different pattern.

So if you think of like transformers, it can go from a race car to a dinosaur.

So you can take the same thing, fold it in a different way, and it has different characteristics.

Now when this protein misfolds, it takes on two new characteristics.

So one, that it's pathological.

So the presence of this misfolded protein on your neurons causes the neurons to die.

So it causes this fatal, untreatable, neurodegenerative disease.

The other characteristic it takes on is that it's self-propagating.

So when the misfolded form of the protein encounters the properly folded form, it causes it to misfold.

So one becomes two, two becomes four.

So as soon as you have one of these misfolded proteins within your body, it starts this cascade of misfolding events that eventually leads to your death.

So a brand new category of infectious diseases and a brand new way to think about proteins as well.

That conventional theory was that they can only fold into one particular pattern and that was it.

Having a protein that can adopt two different conformations was such a different characteristics associated about it was really a game changer in the protein world okay and with you saying

that it's newer what are how i guess you've been working on it for two decades you said so but that's still i would say newer in the form of biology right so kind of how new is it and where where did this start or do we think that it started

So where we first came to appreciation of what prion diseases were, it was at the end of World War II that New Guinea got divided in half and the Eastern half went to the Australians.

And the Australians started to send in all of their people to investigate what was going on there.