A prion disease that destroys the brains of dromedary camels has now been confirmed in a second North African country, raising questions about how far it may have already spread and whether current surveillance can catch it.
The findings, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the CDC’s peer-reviewed journal, come from Abdelkader Amara and colleagues at Tunisian and Italian research institutions. The team documented camel prion disease, or CPrD, in six dromedary camels in Tataouine, Tunisia’s southernmost governorate, between 2019 and 2021. Amara, an emeritus professor at Tunisia’s National School of Veterinary Medicine of Sidi Thabet, has spent his career studying prion diseases in ruminants and camels.
CPrD was first identified in Algeria in 2018, making dromedaries the first camelid species known to develop a prion disease. Its appearance in neighboring Tunisia, in camels showing similar neurological decline, suggests the disease may be more widespread across the region than previously understood. Because camels are central to pastoral economies across North Africa and the Sahel, the stakes extend beyond veterinary medicine.
After the Algerian discovery, the Tunisian team set up a surveillance network and identified eight camels over three years with signs consistent with prion disease. Using Western blot and immunohistochemistry, the standard tools for prion surveillance in Europe, they confirmed six of the eight cases. The molecular profile matched the Algerian cases, suggesting the same strain is circulating in both countries.
One especially concerning finding: the abnormal prion protein turned up in lymph nodes, a trait shared with sheep scrapie and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk. That kind of spread beyond the brain, known as extraneural propagation, is what allows chronic wasting disease to shed into the environment through saliva, urine, and feces, where it can linger and infect other animals. If CPrD behaves the same way, contaminated pastures and shared water sources could spread the disease between herds with no direct contact needed.
The ages of the affected camels raise further concern. Several showed symptoms as young as three, near the age of sexual maturity. In scrapie and chronic wasting disease, such early onset usually points to high-dose exposure or transmission from mother to offspring, a pattern that elsewhere has signaled a larger hidden disease burden than case counts alone suggest.
Sheep scrapie has also been found in the same Tataouine region, raising questions about whether the two diseases could be interacting at the ecological or strain level. The authors stress that no such link has been shown, but they are calling for bioassay studies to check whether cross-species adaptation could occur.
The human health angle remains theoretical, but cannot be waved away. The authors point to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the only animal prion disease confirmed to cross into humans, where it causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It took a decade for scientists to recognize BSE in British cattle as a human health threat, a lag now treated as the cautionary benchmark for prion risk assessment. The authors are careful to note that CPrD has not been shown to infect humans.
Sources and further reading
Amara A, Di Bari MA, Elmehatli K, et al. Camel Prion Disease, Tataouine, Tunisia, 2019–2021. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 16 June 2026.
This article was researched and sourced by Global Biodefense editors and reported with Claude AI assistance for drafting and editing.