Humans gave deer Covid-19 — and it could seriously backfire

These animals could become a breeding ground for Covid-19.

Covid-19 isn’t only a human infectious disease. The pandemic, the origin of which is believed to be zoonotic, saw many other animals infected, like cats, dogs, horses, and now even deer.

According to a study published Monday in Nature Communications, humans transmitted Covid-19 to white-tailed deer hundreds of times in late 2021 and early 2022. The study, which was spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), collected over 8,000 respiratory samples from free-ranging white-tailed deer across 26 states and Washington, DC. The researchers identified over 280 viruses, a great portion of which from 109 independent spillover events from humans. Some of these infections led to 39 cases of deer-to-deer transmission and potential spillover back to humans. FULL STORY from Inverse