Doctoral Defense

From Soils to Streams: Characterizing the Hydrological Transport of Chronic Wasting Disease Prions

Chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal neurodegenerative disease affecting cervids, is spreading rapidly across North America, raising concerns for wildlife and human health. CWD is caused by infectious prion protein, an under-characterized pathogen that is highly stable and persistent in the environment. Given that there is no cure for CWD and no reliable method to denature infectious prions in the environment, indirect disease transmission via environmental processes has the potential to sustain and expand the spread of CWD. Thus, it is vital to characterize and mitigate environmental drivers of CWD transmission in order to contain the disease. In particular, aquatic environments and hydrological transport processes may significantly affect both local transmission and geographic spread due to their ubiquity and interconnectedness on continental scales. In my dissertation, I use a variety of methods and approaches to further characterize how hydrological processes affect infectious prion persistence and transport risk in the environment. Incorporating environmental factors into CWD assessment and management is necessary for comprehensive disease mitigation. To this end, my dissertation work advances our understanding of prion-environmental interactions and explores novel approaches for performing interdisciplinary environmental CWD research.