The link is not 100% but two hunters eating from the same deer population and falling ill at around the same time is extremely unlikely to be a coincidence.
We are essentially one mutation away from this spreading between humans and that would be very, very bad.
True that it’s not a virus but prions can mutate in the sense that they are just proteins like any other, produced according to their genes. The gene coding for the prion protein can mutate, producing a prion that is better at making, e.g., the human analog fold into a prion.
sure the coding gene can mutate but there’s no feedback mechanism to make this more likely as the disease spreads like with a virus.
Sure but the OP is correct.
They aren’t produced according the their genes. They don’t affect DNA like viruses do. They are a removed lower energy configuration of a protein. When the removed protein bumps into a healthy form of itself, the forces between the molecules pull the healthy protein into the prion shape. Then they go their separate ways, exponentially eating holes through tissues.
The protein targeted by CWD is different in cervids, it has like an extra loop that is important for its function. So if a CWD prion bumps into the human version of the protein, nothing happens. But, if some weird interaction allowed it to actually work, it’s feasible a human prion could be created.
Prions are just proteins that can fold in a way that self-propagates by causing other instances of the same (or very similar) protein to also misfold the same way. This is how they cause infectious disease. The downstream impacts vary because it depends on what the misfolded protein actually does in addition to helping other instances misfold. Most often it just accumulates, avoiding destruction by the cell’s usual mechanisms of destroying misfolded proteins (most prions that can’t avoid this would be destroyed before we could even notice their existence). But even just accumulating a bunch of a prion can be devastating, as their mass can be disruptive and the actual functional amount of the normally folded protein becomes effectively nil.
But like all proteins, they are indeed still produced according to their genes. Proteins are generated through the transcription and translation processes.