As someone with anxiety and eye problems, I'm not feeling great.
The top comment sheds some light on the rarity of the disease and the article just being some sort of fear mongering -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18648393
Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
41–50 of 195 posts
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). And science doesn't know how they get misfolded in the first place then they basically go "hey other protein, boop you're like me now, let's burn this mother to the ground" and then you get something similar to the 'corrupted blood incident' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident except you lose your m…
There are plenty of ways that a protein could be mis-folded. There is a lot of bumpiness in a cell (though this is unlikely to lead to this). A random mutation (through some sort of radiation) could change a piece of DNA or RNA, causing the protein to be made incorrectly. All of these are frighteningly unlikely. But happen so often they are almost certain to do so in a large enough time, with a large enough populatio…
"Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation."
If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, and has put a lot of non-trivial work into ensuring it. Almost anything you can think of that would reduce the computational load for simulating a human being would eliminate the possibility of prions arising in the first place, since "protein folding" is one of the first things you'd want to get rid of to cut the load down.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#43Prion disease is exceedingly rare. CJD is the most common, with an incidence of 1 per 1,000,000 person-years worldwide, inclusive of all transmission vectors (including medical procedures). Iatrogenic transmission is a rarer subset still: the riskiest transplants (with respect to CJD) are in the central nervous system. The UK tracked their transmission rates from 1970 to 2003 (a long period is needed because surgical…
Is alzheimers a prion disease, or maybe just Prions are involved?
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#44Given that prions are proteins, why can't we use immunotherapy and vaccinate?
Well the immune system needs to be able to do something of use in response. Just putting it in even with an immune sensitizing agent would add another prion that it can't do anything useful about. But antibodies, if we had ones that worked for a strain and weren't essentially prions themselves we could vaccinate for it or use it to "chelate" assuming the prion grabbers wouldn't cause other unacceptable problems.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#45About 20 or so years ago I was feeling bad about my chances of developing the type of CJD associated with mad cow disease because of all the burgers I'd eaten over the preceding years. There were also human cases getting reported at a rate that some suggested matched the pattern for the early days of an epidemic. Luckily that never materialised. Still though having lived in the UK during a certain time period preclud…
Sorry friend. Not off the hook yet:
> patients with very long incubation periods of at least 34 years, and probably more than 40 years.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#46I had project in college on Prions. Some interesting things I remember: * Kuru (laughing disease) was transmitted from cannibalism. Women and children of the tribe were more likely to contract it because they were more often given the less palatable parts of the bodies, which included brains * Some countries do not trust American cattle because our standards for Prion screening are too low * Kentucky has issues with…
Cooked goat and cow heads are a delicacy in some regions of Tunisia. Obviously, this includes the brain. I now wonder if Prions have ever been an issue in Tunisia...
http://n.neurology.org/content/35/6/894
Maybe it is an issue but goes underreported? Prions related diseases were historically easy to misdiagnose because they can present in so many different ways. I'm sure medical science has caught up in 1st world countries but maybe lags elsewhere?
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#47Not all prions are bad [1]. We still need to study them and their protein precursors to understand them more.
[1] https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-bright-side-of-pr...
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). And science doesn't know how they get misfolded in the first place then they basically go "hey other protein, boop you're like me now, let's burn this mother to the ground" and then you get something similar to the 'corrupted blood incident' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident except you lose your m…
There are plenty of ways that a protein could be mis-folded. There is a lot of bumpiness in a cell (though this is unlikely to lead to this). A random mutation (through some sort of radiation) could change a piece of DNA or RNA, causing the protein to be made incorrectly. All of these are frighteningly unlikely. But happen so often they are almost certain to do so in a large enough time, with a large enough populatio…
>It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold
Second sentence of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
>Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation.
To you, to me they do. I imagine with the logic you're using, nothing suggests we live in a simulation. I however recognize this as one of dozens of things that are like "hey wait a minute". No where in my replies have I stated "THIS IS IRREFUTABLE PROOF REALITY IS A LIE!" I said this is one of the things that makes me seriously consider the simulation hypothesis. One. Of many.
>The similarities to the 'corrupted blood incident' start and end with them both spreading to others in a local area.
One is an anomalous protein that causes other proteins it comes in contact with to become anomalous spreading out of control and ultimately killing the host the other was code meant to do a specific thing, in a specific area, that due to a bug (that allowed the infection to leave restricted areas) caused anything that it came in contact with to become corrupted spreading out of control.
I didn't say "ermagerd this is the thing that happened on gorkamorka" I said 'this reminds me of the corrupted blood incident', which it in fact does.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Born and raised in Kentucky (Lexington). I've never heard of squirrel brains as a dish. That's an interesting tidbit. Would it be fair to guess that the parts of KY this is popular are on the south eastern part of the state on the border with West Virginia? All of the normal rules of everything are different when you're in Appalachia.
Here's some info from a quick google: http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/victim23.html Looks like the dish is called Burgoo > The center of the burgoo universe is Owensboro, Kentucky
Just when I thought my home state couldn't embarrass me more by being backwards...
Thanks!
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#50Prion disease is exceedingly rare. CJD is the most common, with an incidence of 1 per 1,000,000 person-years worldwide, inclusive of all transmission vectors (including medical procedures). Iatrogenic transmission is a rarer subset still: the riskiest transplants (with respect to CJD) are in the central nervous system. The UK tracked their transmission rates from 1970 to 2003 (a long period is needed because surgical…
Infectious disease is one area where fear of the unknown is rational. We don't just need to defend against existing diseases, but also diseases yet to emerge. Just because CJD is rare doesn't mean that the next prion disease will be, so it would make sense to take measures to prevent transmission of prions now.
I don't think that's true. Prions aren't bacteria or viruses that evolve and transmit. They're mostly just a misfolded protein that occurs spontaneously. (They can then be transmitted.)
I'm not sure there will ever be a prion that hasn't already existed, whereas I am sure there will be new viruses and bacteria.