Heather Inzalaco the lead researcher looked into a project to find out if ticks could carry and spread CWD to other deer. The University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher discovered that ticks could host CWD prions and then spread the prions to other whitetail deer if the deer ate the ticks.

The research disclosed that prions in ticks from three CWD-positive deer heads had an infectious dose range of 0.3 to 42.4 per tick. That means one tick in the study had 1/3 of an infectious dose of CWD, while another tick had 42.4 times the infectious dose of CWD. Then, that single tick could be ingested by another deer and therefore infect it with CWD.

Heather said, “Deer engages in allogrooming, which is a type of grooming between the same members of species. During allogrooming, they’re picking off ticks and parasites from one another and sometimes even ingesting the ticks.”

Heather wanted to assess the possible risk of ticks with the whitetail deer population. She applied for a grant and started her first steps of understanding the interaction.

She went on to say, “There was endless supply of deer heads, and I certainly didn’t look at every deer head, but I probably looked through about 2,000 heads and I was looking to collect ticks that were attached to the head and had some blood meal. If they were engorged or partially engorged, that was perfect.”

Heather said out of the 2000 deer heads that she viewed, 173 of them were infected with ticks. Out of the 173 about 15 of them tested positive for CWD.

Out of the 15 CWD- positive deer heads, only three had prions in them. She collected the ear from every CWD-positive deer and tested it. She discovered there was a correlation between the ear tissue testing positive and the tick testing positive. Also, the ear tissue that had higher amounts of prions correlated with ticks having a higher number of prions too.

Heather said she learned a lot from the research and enjoyed working with her colleagues across the country. She hopes the study will reach state natural resources departments and they can consider its finding.