This article make me unwell. Just thinking of the cannibalism makes me wanna throw up.
When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
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Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#22I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept. Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.
It can happen anywhere at anytime, that's why it's so terrifying.
There's a bit of good news in the fact that the biosphere has not only endured these last 3.8 billion years or so, but it has thrived. So there's probably no prion apocalypse in the future - at least not at the scale of the whole biosphere.
Individuals and species, on the other hand, seem to be fair game.
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#23I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was occurring because cows were being fed the ground up remains of other cows and that included cow brain and cow nervous tissue. So basically what was happening with cows was the same as what was happening with people getting Kuru.
I also recall learning that in order to get mad cow disease you would need to eat cow brain or cow nervous tissue. Of course, you would probably assume, as I did, that you are safe because you don't eat cow brains or nervous tissue. Well, you could be wrong about that. There is something called AMR (advanced meat recovery). As I understand it, when the meat processing plant removes the spine and skull from the cow there is still some meat stuck to the spine and skull. The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. But the result is that some nervous tissue from the cow can get mixed up in ground meat created with the AMR technique and that is one way that you could end up eating cow nervous tissue. After I did that research, I swore off ground meat.
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#24For the past months I've been seriously considering starting a theme restaurant that served wild meats - deer, hogs, gators, large constrictors, etc. That idea just went out the window.
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#25I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed. I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed. That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are: (a…
Wow, what a frightening letter to receive! Thank you for sharing and best of health to you and your family.
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#26NPR needs to be more concise. Their informative articles such as this one are written as if the writer is trying to get an A in creative writing 101. Knock off the color and give us the scoop in 2-3 paragraphs.
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#27I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept. Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.
What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? Are prions targeted by the immune system at all? That to me is what is scary about them.
Not a direct answer to your question (because I don't know) but there's a couple doing research into a cure for prion disease because one of them (Sonia Vallabh) has it.
Eric Minikel has been blogging about their research [1] [2], maintains an active Twitter presence [3] and has GitHub [4] repositories on the issue. The blog has a lot of information for anyone wanting to know more about bioinformatics, basic research and prion disease in particular.
[2] http://www.cureffi.org/about/
Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#28Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
#29Okay, atleast some benefit of being a vegetarian. But iirc there was some vegies too that can infect the brain.