Plandemic Watch – Prion Disease… Biologists Sound Alarm Over Incurable Deadly Threat to Humans

August 17, 2026

They have not yet established populations in the United States, but warming temperatures are pushing their range farther north through Mexico.

At the same time, chronic wasting disease continues spreading south through deer populations.

CWD has now been detected in 37 states.

Larsen said projections indicate the disease could eventually circulate across all of the lower 48 states, every Canadian province, and Mexico by 2030.

Surveillance in Mexico remains limited, but deer transported there from Texas ranches were later linked to facilities found to be CWD-positive.

That has raised fears the disease may already be circulating undetected south of the border.

“If I had to guess, I would say it’s 70 percent possible that there are already vampire bats feeding on [CWD-] positive animals in Mexico,” Larsen told CIDRAP.

Scientists Fear a Deadly Prion Chain Reaction

CWD is caused by malformed proteins known as prions.

These abnormal proteins destroy brain tissue, triggering severe neurological decline, behavioral changes, loss of coordination, and death.

A vampire bat feeding on an infected deer could ingest infectious prions through the animal’s blood.

Larsen said a single blood meal from an infected deer could contain several infectious doses, even before the animal begins showing symptoms.

As CWD progresses, infected deer often become disoriented and less mobile, making them easier targets for blood-feeding bats.

That is especially concerning on fenced ranches, where infected animals have fewer opportunities to move away.

The fear is that a bat exposed to CWD could later feed on cattle and introduce prions into a new species.

Scientists do not yet know whether that transmission would occur, but prion diseases have crossed species barriers before.

Mad Cow Crisis Shows the Danger Is Real

The most notorious example remains the mad cow crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.

Humans who consumed contaminated beef developed variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurological disorder caused by prions.

The outbreak killed 178 people, most of them in the United Kingdom.

Researchers have also proposed that CWD itself may have emerged after mule deer housed near sheep were repeatedly exposed to scrapie, another deadly prion disease.

That hypothesis remains unproven, but Larsen warned that species barriers should not be treated as impenetrable.

“I don’t think the species barrier is absolute. I think it’s porous,” Larsen said.

“I think it’s likely that CWD will cause prion disease in other species, including humans, and that it’s just a matter of time.”

Experts Warn the Threat Could Grow Fast

There is currently no evidence that vampire bats transmit CWD, that cattle have contracted the disease from deer, or that CWD has infected humans.

But the geographic trends are moving in the wrong direction.

CWD is spreading through more deer populations while vampire bats continue moving north.

That means the two threats are getting closer to overlapping.

Larsen warned that if infected deer and vampire bats are already interacting in Mexico, the conditions for a dangerous species-jump experiment may already exist in the wild.

Former Montana state veterinarian Martin Zaluski said the chain of transmission remains unlikely and stressed that prion diseases generally stay confined to individual species.

Even so, the mad cow crisis proved that once a prion disease breaks through into the food chain, the consequences can be devastating.

The warning from researchers is clear: the time to study the threat is before vampire bats, infected deer, cattle, and humans become links in the same deadly chain.