You just use bleach and then autoclave: >"combining autoclaving (even at 121 degrees C) with a sodium hydroxide treatment is extremely effective." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10658760
Bleach is sodium hypochlorite; sodium hydroxide is lye/caustic soda.
Yea, sorry. Earlier in the abstract it mentioned sodium hypochlorite then I didnt read closely: "Strong sodium hypochiorite solutions achieve inactivation but other chlorine-releasing compounds are less effective"
Usually there is some sodium hydroxide in standard sodium hypochlorite bleach solution as well though, perhaps that explains why they reported it is the most effective of the chlorine bleaches.
Is alzheimers a prion disease, or maybe just Prions are involved?
My understanding is that there is some evidence that Alzheimer's is transmissible (e.g. higher rate of incidence in caregivers and neurosurgeons), but more study is needed.
A study showed that if they wired two mice's circulatory systems together, one with Alzheimer's and one without, the second one would eventually develop everyone's favorite brain plaques.
So while wiring together two bloodstreams is a bit extreme, and likely to result in most things being transmissible, there's nonzero evidence that you can have a bad day from a blood transfusion.
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.
If they can replicate imperfectly, they're subject that evolutionary processes.
Not exactly. Presumably almost all imperfect replications lead to dead ends (or we'd all be dead). Also, because they transmit poorly from host to host, even if one did evolve, which might be impossible, it'd probably die when it's host did.
Given that each human replicates each protein many millions of times over the course of their life, and that there have been several billion humans alive, if that were possible we'd probably have experienced it by now and again all be dead.
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…
Scrapie, a prion disease of goats and sheep, is severe enough that there are national efforts to combat it.
What if this were suddenly transmissible to humans?
"In the United Kingdom, the government has put in place a National Scrapie Plan, which encourages breeding from sheep that are genetically more resistant to scrapie. This is intended to eventually reduce the incidence of the disease in the UK sheep population."
There is a great hypothesis that I remember my dad telling me recently, although I can't remember where he heard it from, that the reason that prion disease is so rare in humans is because we're, historically, very cannibalistic, so resistance to prions was heavily selected for.
The very opposite of this hypothesis is actually more likely to be true. Kuru is a manifestation of this same prion disease (PRNP gene variant disease) that is essentially only found in people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual.
This is exactly the wrong interpretation. We know that cannibalism causes prion disease, and we have known that for as long as we have known about prion disease. the question is not whether cannibalism causes prion disease, which it definitely does, but whether past cannibalism was common enough to have selected for some innate resistance to it.
The very opposite of this hypothesis is actually more likely to be true. Kuru is a manifestation of this same prion disease (PRNP gene variant disease) that is essentially only found in people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual.
This is exactly the wrong interpretation. We know that cannibalism causes prion disease, and we have known that for as long as we have known about prion disease. the question is not whether cannibalism causes prion disease, which it definitely does, but whether past cannibalism was common enough to have selected for some innate resistance to it. http://www.virology.ws/2015/06/12/resistance-to-prion-diseas...
Like you said, we know that cannibalism causes prion disease. We know this. Thus, we are not resistant to it. So from an evolutionary perspective you could make a strong argument that what actually happened was that those humans who didn't engage in cannibalism and die of prion disease were heavily selected for. Which is probably why you don't see many humans eating the dead. Now that last bit is speculation, but all this is speculation. But based on my own introspection, I'm imagining myself stumbling upon a recently dead human corpse, I'm almost certain my innate reaction -- (well, almost surely innate, and not socialized, since I've never been explicitly taught how to react in such a situation) -- is that I'm definitely not going to fucking eat that corpse. In fact, the only humans that do seem to still engage in cannibalism do it out of some social ritual.
This is exactly the wrong interpretation. We know that cannibalism causes prion disease, and we have known that for as long as we have known about prion disease. the question is not whether cannibalism causes prion disease, which it definitely does, but whether past cannibalism was common enough to have selected for some innate resistance to it. http://www.virology.ws/2015/06/12/resistance-to-prion-diseas...
Like you said, we know that cannibalism causes prion disease. We know this. Thus, we are not resistant to it. So from an evolutionary perspective you could make a strong argument that what actually happened was that those humans who didn't engage in cannibalism and die of prion disease were heavily selected for. Which is probably why you don't see many humans eating the dead. Now that last bit is speculation, but all…
the prevalence of the PNRP gene is much better explained by periods of time when humans were very cannibalistic. This makes more sense behaviorally as well, since humans are very difficult to program with instincts. I would bet dollars to donuts that the average hunter gatherer/early farmer had no such revulsion. Meat is meat.
This is exactly the wrong interpretation. We know that cannibalism causes prion disease, and we have known that for as long as we have known about prion disease. the question is not whether cannibalism causes prion disease, which it definitely does, but whether past cannibalism was common enough to have selected for some innate resistance to it. http://www.virology.ws/2015/06/12/resistance-to-prion-diseas...
Like you said, we know that cannibalism causes prion disease. We know this. Thus, we are not resistant to it. So from an evolutionary perspective you could make a strong argument that what actually happened was that those humans who didn't engage in cannibalism and die of prion disease were heavily selected for. Which is probably why you don't see many humans eating the dead. Now that last bit is speculation, but all…
to nitpick, you probably WERE taught how to react by countless books, movies, stories in which people don't even think of eating corpses
Like you said, we know that cannibalism causes prion disease. We know this. Thus, we are not resistant to it. So from an evolutionary perspective you could make a strong argument that what actually happened was that those humans who didn't engage in cannibalism and die of prion disease were heavily selected for. Which is probably why you don't see many humans eating the dead. Now that last bit is speculation, but all…
the prevalence of the PNRP gene is much better explained by periods of time when humans were very cannibalistic. This makes more sense behaviorally as well, since humans are very difficult to program with instincts. I would bet dollars to donuts that the average hunter gatherer/early farmer had no such revulsion. Meat is meat.
Well here is the major point: there is only one prion (PRNP), for which all mammals seem to be susceptible to disease. It would be odd if deer and sheep had coevolved the same resistances and susceptibility to PRNP due to human cannibalism
Like you said, we know that cannibalism causes prion disease. We know this. Thus, we are not resistant to it. So from an evolutionary perspective you could make a strong argument that what actually happened was that those humans who didn't engage in cannibalism and die of prion disease were heavily selected for. Which is probably why you don't see many humans eating the dead. Now that last bit is speculation, but all…
to nitpick, you probably WERE taught how to react by countless books, movies, stories in which people don't even think of eating corpses
True, but u could make the same argument for (literal) shit. Life reflects art reflects life, and so it goes.