Publications by authors named "Amber Mayfield"
Article Synopsis
- * Researchers collected fetal tissues from infected mothers (CWD+) and found prion seeds in 50% of the samples, with some detected as early as 113 days of gestation.
- * This finding marks the first instance of detecting CWD in fetal tissues of free-ranging deer and highlights the need for further research to understand its implications in spreading the disease across cervid populations in North America.
The presence of disease-associated prions in tissues and bodily fluids of chronic wasting disease (CWD)-infected cervids has received much investigation, yet little is known about mother-to-offspring transmission of CWD. Our previous work demonstrated that mother-to-offspring transmission is efficient in an experimental setting. To address the question of relevance in a naturally exposed free-ranging population, we assessed maternal and fetal tissues derived from 19 elk dam-calf pairs collected from free-ranging Rocky Mountain elk from north-central Colorado, a known CWD endemic region.
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