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Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

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Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#151

Post by selimthegrim »

zaarn wrote: post #86
arkades wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We take measures now, for tissues where prions are a possible transmission risk. The article mis-represented that. But: (1) there are only so many resources to go around. Should we be devoting them to vanishingly rare things rather than things that might actually affect you? (2) prions will never be a wildfire plague. They have little or no tranmissive ability, by nature of being absolutely naked protein. One step up…

Nitpick but the step between virus and prion is a viroid; a naked piece of RNA. They mostly exist in plants to my knowledge and are basically the smallest possible infectious disease. The smallest viroids clock in at around 120 base pairs (240 nucleotides).

What's a virion?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/10/mysterious-p...

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#152

Post by selimthegrim »

OldFatCactus wrote: post #40
SEJeff wrote: post #35

Earlier 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

Clearly you contract the disease if you get behind on the salary to the black preacher.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#153

Post by barking »

dev_dull wrote: post #45
barking wrote: post #7

About 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...

The uptick in cases should have started in about 2014 (if 34 years ) or 2020 (if 40 years) and start to tail off a decade later.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#154

Post by bimr »

arkades wrote: post #10

Prion 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…

On the contrary, this falls within Nassim Taleb's Minority Rule. Prions, being nearly indestructable, are an intransigent minority that will eventually hold sway over the rest of us.

Many on this board point to the inelasticity of their transmissible potential and call this fear-mongering. However, it is that same inelasticity that makes them intransigent. Once they have compromised an instrument, that instrument will remain compromised until each prion has specifically been destroyed. When you pair that intransigence with its lengthy incubation period, you actually have a force multiplier that, while not viral, would be scary enough to change behavior.

Fortunately, the article hints that retinal scans may eventually be used for initial diagnosis.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#155

Post by thinkpad20 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #142
tossandturn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions are like gamma-induced bit flips, Viroids are like small code patches, and Viruses are self-deploying code patches.

What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.

To be precise, these aren’t really analogies, they are in fact similes. :)

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#156

Post by kenbellows »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #155
jvanderbot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.

To be precise, these aren’t really analogies, they are in fact similes. :)

To be precise, similes are a type of analogy

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#157

Post by an_account_name »

OldFatCactus wrote: post #24

I 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…

Wow, the Wikipedia page for Kuru says there’s a mutation of the Kuru prion that confers immunity to Kuru. That’s crazy to me, but makes sense from a selection perspective.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#158

Post by Dylan16807 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #134
Dylan16807 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation? Here, let me ask the most important question: What evidence about how things work on earth would make you less likely to believe the world is a simulation? Because it's always possible to come up with a justification after seeing evidence. (Other planets are a different issue entirely.)

>Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation? No, I'm saying that the fact that we can see down to a subatomic level which adds considerable complexity to a hypothetical simulation is not evidence that it is impossible that we live in a simulation. If you tried to describe a 2018 smartphone to Konrad Zuse in 1936 he'd have thought you were either quite mad or a science ficti…

> No, I'm saying that the fact that we can see down to a subatomic level which adds considerable complexity to a hypothetical simulation is not evidence that it is impossible that we live in a simulation.

Okay, but I suggest you be a bit more careful with wording in the future. "These are both somewhat my logic" made it sound like the complexity was reinforcing the idea, rather than merely not completely disproving the idea.

With that clarified the rest of what I said is useless and a waste of both our time.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#159

Post by arkades »

nwallin wrote: post #145
arkades wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We take measures now, for tissues where prions are a possible transmission risk. The article mis-represented that. But: (1) there are only so many resources to go around. Should we be devoting them to vanishingly rare things rather than things that might actually affect you? (2) prions will never be a wildfire plague. They have little or no tranmissive ability, by nature of being absolutely naked protein. One step up…

> (2) prions will never be a wildfire plague. They have little or no tranmissive ability, by nature of being absolutely naked protein. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) (affects deer) can be transmitted by infected saliva. One of the symptoms of symptoms of CWD is excessive saliva production. It is very transmissible, and is devastating captive populations of deer, although it is relatively rare in the wild. I think if a…

That is interesting, and new to me. I’ll have to read up on it more. Thank you for the link.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#160

Post by arkades »

selimthegrim wrote: post #151
zaarn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick but the step between virus and prion is a viroid; a naked piece of RNA. They mostly exist in plants to my knowledge and are basically the smallest possible infectious disease. The smallest viroids clock in at around 120 base pairs (240 nucleotides).

What's a virion? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/10/mysterious-p...

A virion is the singular noun for a viral particle. The viral genetic material plus capsid equal an individual virion.
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