A video circulating on social media about a possible cure for chronic wasting disease has gone viral.

“We now are set on a path to end this disease and pending nightmare in Pennsylvania, across America and throughout the world," Unified Sportsman of Pennsylvania ecologist John Eveland said in the video.

The statement was based on the work of neuropathologist Dr. Frank Bastian with the Louisiana State University College of Agriculture. His research breaks from the more traditional theory of the cause of CWD.

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Wildlife biologists have generally accepted that prions, or misfolded proteins, were the cause of the disease, which is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy much like scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The CWD prions are thought to shared between white-tailed deer and other members of the cervidae family such as moose and elk directly and indirectly through saliva, urine and feces.

Once the prions enter a deer, they cause healthy prions in a deer's brain and central nervous system to become misfolded. These rogue proteins effectively eat holes in the animals' brains over an extended period of time and the animals die. It is said to be 100 percent fatal.

Bastian's research indicates that the cause is a bacteria known as Spiroplasma. In his research, he has been able to isolate and grow the bacteria. According to Bastian, when sheep, goats and deer were injected with Spiroplasma they developed clinical signs of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). Chronic wasting disease is a type of TSE. . Bastian's research indicates Spiroplasma is also at the root of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and mad cow disease.

According to an LSU AgCenter press release, the findings make it possible for the development of tests and vaccines for the bacteria. In the video, Eveland said he expects field testing for CWD could come within 1-2 years and vaccines for both free-range and captive animals in following years.

“I would like to give hunters a test kit that they can carry in the woods so they can test their kill for presence of the bacteria while they are in the field,” Bastian said in a Dec. 2017 press release. “Hunters need to know whether their kill is infected before they consume the meat."

“The problem that hunters face in eating potentially infected meat is that heat does not kill this bacteria. Eighty-five degrees centigrade (185 degrees Fahrenheit) does not affect it and the bacteria survive up to boiling (100 degrees centigrade or 212 degrees Fahrenheit). This is significant because E.coli is dead at 80 (176 degrees Fahrenheit).”

While this information is spreading through social media and is the latest buzz among hunters, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks Wildlife Bureau executive director Russ Walsh said Bastian's work needs to be vetted and replicated before it is taken as fact.

"There's a lot of questions if it is indeed credible science," Walsh said. "We're not discounting it, but we want to know more.

"Certainly, it could be plausible. There's still a lot of questions about prions and the prion theory. The scientific community will know more through research. This could be a large paradigm shift in the scientific community."

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Contact Brian Broom at 601-961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com. Follow Clarion LedgerOutdoors on Facebook and @BrianBroom on Twitter.