Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 311 posts

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#81

Post by giantg2 »

tremon wrote: post #51
Spare_account wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could see it as possible. The spread is asymmetric. You could have one infected person who is not a super spreader only infect a few other people who just happen to be asymptomatic and not spread it to others. When your overall infected population is very small, like in the beginning of a jump from animals to humans, then you have a chance to get lucky in this way. Once you get to a larger infected population (like dozens of people) then you're more likely to have a super spreader and less likely to get lucky with only contacting asymptomatic people.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#82

Post by Anon4Now »

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.`

Sterrad sterilization machines, which use a hydrogen peroxide gas plasma, have been shown to be very effective against CJD (mad cow) and other prion diseases. However they are very expensive, and almost 20 years after their launch there are only 20k systems installed world wide.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#83

Post by satysin »

samirelanduk wrote: post #15
jokoon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made some news, it was suspicious cases of pneumonia in china. First time I read the article, I was like "uh oh". It did not make the headlines though, but it was still noticeable. I think I spotted it on reddit or hackernews. Maybe the article was on BBC? BBC has quite a good world coverage. I guess you can google news by year. I'm very certain those articles exist. Next time I heard about it, it was getting much…

I don't think there were any reports online until December 31st.

I journal daily and like to capture the news among my daily record. The first time I found COVID/Coronavirus mentioned by BBC News was January 3rd 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025.

It is of course possible I missed a story but before January 3rd there was little to no mainstream news coverage. It is quite frustrating to find accurate articles now as many sites are falsely returned in date range Google searches. All "mystery flu-like pneumonia" stories I've found reported in December 2019 are medical news so it is extremely unlikely someone would come across such an article as part of normal news reading.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#84

Post by jeswin »

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?

I lost someone very close to me to sporadic CJD. This was some time back, but the episode is one of the most troubling moments in my life because of the suffering it inflicts on the patient - the hallucinations with no way to communicate or to stop it.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#85

Post by giantg2 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #60
tauntz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bleach works as surface decontamination agent. They know it works for CWD, and I expect it works for others too.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#86

Post by Leherenn »

jokoon wrote: post #14
drran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How and where you were able to read this?

It made some news, it was suspicious cases of pneumonia in china. First time I read the article, I was like "uh oh". It did not make the headlines though, but it was still noticeable. I think I spotted it on reddit or hackernews. Maybe the article was on BBC? BBC has quite a good world coverage. I guess you can google news by year. I'm very certain those articles exist. Next time I heard about it, it was getting much…

Some months back, I had the same recollection: an article about suspicious pneumonia cases in China published by the BBC sometimes in December. I did some searching, and nothing, I think the first article is from the 31st of December. Funny how the mind can trick you, maybe it is linked to "Déjà vu" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#87

Post by giantg2 »

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.`

That's not entirely true. They know that bleach can be used against CWD for surface decontamination. I would call a 50/50 bleach water solution quite common for disinfectant.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#88

Post by FredPret »

giantg2 wrote: post #70
colechristensen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took affected neural tissue and burned it to ash on a wood fire, there remains (although low) infective potential but probably only if you were trying in a lab. It takes 1000 C incineration to defeat infectivity and even then they’re still detectable. Composting so the proteins are broken down biologically is also an alternative. No amount of cooking prions that leave anything you want to eat makes infected ma…

Agree that cooking is not an option. You can actually get that 1000C down to 600C if you also soak the tissue in acid prior to burning.

That pretty much describes how I cook my steaks, a nice H2SO4 marinade followed by ten minutes in a bonfire

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#89

Post by withinboredom »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #19
withinboredom wrote: post #11

Since prions can be inhaled via aerosoles[1], I often wonder how long it will be until vaping causes prion diseases to rapidly spread. Or new prions to be introduced. [1]: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

What on earth does vaping specifically have to do with the aerosol transmission of prions? Unless there are misfolded proteins in the liquid, but that's just as likely as them being in your beef, the air around you, someone chopping meat or anything else. Your vaping reference seems odd.

If (and it's a big if) they were in the liquid, someone walking down the street and hitting their vape could "infect" quite a lot of people. The delay between that point and the onset of symptoms would make it very hard to pinpoint the vape as the cause.

It's just interesting to think about.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#90

Post by phyalow »

satysin wrote: post #83
samirelanduk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there were any reports online until December 31st.

I journal daily and like to capture the news among my daily record. The first time I found COVID/Coronavirus mentioned by BBC News was January 3rd 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50984025 . It is of course possible I missed a story but before January 3rd there was little to no mainstream news coverage. It is quite frustrating to find accurate articles now as many sites are falsely returned in date rang…

On January the 4th their were posters (printed A4) up on Public Transport in Hong Kong. I remember thinking it was very strange - I had heard a story on the BBC world service the night before. The posters warned of a "Novel Pneumonia from Southern China". How the world changed...
Post reply on HN