COVID spread among deer who passed mutations back to humans — with scientists calling it a ‘unique public health risk’
Oh, deer …
COVID appears to have spread widely among the 30 million deer roaming the US — with some passing mutated forms back to people, according to a government-led study calling it a “unique public health risk.”
Researchers, including several from federal agencies, say they found “at least 109 independent spillovers” of the virus spreading from people to deer, including in New York.
It then mutated while being spread among deer — with the unique strain found in at least three cases passed back to humans, according to findings
“Deer regularly interact with humans and are commonly found in human environments — near our homes, pets, wastewater and trash,” said the paper’s author, zoonotic disease expert Xiu-Feng Wan.
“The potential for [COVD], or any zoonotic disease,🦹 to p💞ersist and evolve in wildlife populations can pose unique public health risks.”
Specifically, the “spillover” of “deer-adapted strains back to humans” could “undermine the effectiveness of the pre-existing immunity” from previous infections — and even vaccines, the study warned.
As well as strains unique to deer, the study found that the mammals appeared to spread others “months after the decline of those lineages in the human population.”
That also “may pose a greater risk as immunity to these lineages wane,” warned the study, which involved experts from the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two of the cases of deer-specific strains being passed to humans were found in North Carolina and an𝕴other in Massachusetts.
However, more research is needed to show exactly how the virus was being spread from humans to deer and then back again, said the study, calling for more research on it💮.
But “given the high abundance of white-tailed deer in the US and their distribution throughout rural, suburban, and urban environments, direct and indirect interactions … are frequent,” the report said.
Deer could get the virus “from exposures to contaminated environments” and infected objects like food and abandoned masks, the study suggested. It’s even possible they got infected through other animals like foxes, skunks or rats.
Either way, the virus appears to spread so efficiently among deer that the mammals could be a “reservoir” of COVID “presenting continuous risks for zoonotic transmission back to people,” warned the researchers.