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Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

bbc.com

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Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#51

Post by tremon »

Spare_account wrote: post #45
TorKlingberg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have a link to the article from that time I'm going to guess that is a false memory or something unrelated.

Not the same guy, but perhaps you can help me understand if this event is related? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/asia/plague-china-p... Date: November 13 2019 > Li Jifeng, a doctor at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital where the two people sought treatment, wrote on WeChat, a social media platform, that the patients sought treatment on Nov. 3 > “After so many years of specialist training, I’m familiar with the diag…

At most it might have been a precursor to SARS-Cov-2, but it's unlikely to be the same agent. We've seen how wildly virulent that variant is; there's no way I can see that that virus could have been found in the wild in a city like Beijing and not cause the same problems we saw in Wuhan two months later.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#53

Post by callamdelaney »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #35
jokoon wrote: post #4

I was scared for a bit. This reminds me that I first read about early cases of covid around october or november 2019.

Unless you have a link to the article from that time I'm going to guess that is a false memory or something unrelated.

I'm pretty sure I read a very accurate post on /r/wallstreetbets about covid-19 in late 2019/early 2020.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#56

Post by medstrom »

codingbeer wrote: post #50
sirsinsalot wrote: post #24

Prion diseases terrify me. Especially having been in the UK eating beef at the time of the BSE outbreaks in the 1990s. I wonder if there have been studies on the scale of potential latent vCJD/Prion disease in the population?

Whenever a topic about something that could potentially destroy humanity comes up (say, climate issues), there is always some comment that makes a reasonable argument of why things are not as bad as they seem. This never happens when prions are the topic.

You jinxed it, so I'll be the "some comment": prions won't spread everywhere all at once, so humanity will probably self-isolate in at least a few prion-free clusters.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#57

Post by medstrom »

tauntz wrote: post #47
sirsinsalot wrote: post #24

Prion diseases terrify me. Especially having been in the UK eating beef at the time of the BSE outbreaks in the 1990s. I wonder if there have been studies on the scale of potential latent vCJD/Prion disease in the population?

Prions terrify me as well because it seems like there's no stopping them.. > In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then ta…

>It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment

I really need to grow my own food.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#58

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

rndude wrote: post #31
StavrosK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did prions survive cooking? I'd have thought cooking the beef would have killed them.

Prions are incredible hard to destroy. To quote from Wikipedia: `Prion aggregates are stable, and this structural stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents: they cannot be destroyed by ordinary disinfection or cooking.`

Iirc hospitals that treat patients with prion diseases incinerate all materials that contact the patients. I don't know how they sanitize the rooms but it can't be cheap or eco friendly.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#60

Post by Xcelerate »

tauntz wrote: post #47
sirsinsalot wrote: post #24

Prion diseases terrify me. Especially having been in the UK eating beef at the time of the BSE outbreaks in the 1990s. I wonder if there have been studies on the scale of potential latent vCJD/Prion disease in the population?

Prions terrify me as well because it seems like there's no stopping them.. > In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then ta…

I had read this before. It's horrifying. How do you stop the chain reaction of proteins folding into lower energy states? It's not like a bacteria or virus; it's more like ice-nine, except instead of water it's your brain.
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