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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

#121

Post by M2Ys4U »

arpa wrote: post #39
GordonS wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard this claim about MSG before. I did a quick search on Google, but didn't find anything that looked remotely reputable. I did a quick search on Google Scholar, and everything seemed to be refuting the claim. Do you have any sources you can share?

Yeah, the grandparent is talking out of their rear-end. MSG is well researched and relatively safe. There have been numerous studies refuting the existence of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" and/or attributing the symptoms to allergy to MSG. "Syndrome" was originally a self-reported case study and none subsequent studies with n>10 have been able to replicate the case.

The original MSG/CRS "paper" was a hoax.

Hell, it wasn't even a paper. It was more along the lines of a letter to the editor, IIRC. But a mixture of sinophobia and alt-med woo spread it far and wide.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#123

Post by throwaway316943 »

thehappypm wrote: post #110
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 cannot evolve, which is why they represent such a tiny space in diseases. They're really more a quirk of chemistry than biology.

They can’t evolve independently but biological systems that produce proteins can evolve new proteins and new ways of manipulating proteins. A nightmare scenario would be a bacterial or viral mutation that produced a deadly prion.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#124

Post by AbrahamParangi »

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.

Prions aren’t new, they’re probably as old as proteins- and they haven’t ice-nined the world yet.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#125

Post by dcolkitt »

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.

The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet. That implies a low chance that it'll happen anytime in the near future.

There's no evidence that any significant human population has ever been wiped out by prions at any point in the history of the species. Heck, we haven't even observed widespread (>10% infected) prion disease in any species.

At least with something like climate change, there's the fact that post-industrial activity is doing something different than pre-industrial history. But this reasoning doesn't hold for prion cataclysm. It's more like asteroid apocalypse. Yes it could happen, but statistically it's not something we have to worry about on a civilizational timeframe.

I don't see any justification for why humanity in 2021 is courting prion disaster to a greater degree than it was in 2000 BC. Animal husbandry has existed for fifteen thousand years. Maybe globalization would spread a prion outbreak faster. But the point is we've never even observed localized prion collapse. If prions were that dangerous, there should already be regional areas that have transformed into total no-go zones.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#126

Post by shoemakersteve »

withinboredom wrote: post #89
sirsinsalot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's just interesting to think about.

Is it? Your line of thinking is really confusing to me. The likelihood of this happening by accident is effectively 0%. Even if it was intentional, this makes even less sense. Because then the person would not only have to find some prions to put in their vape, they would also have to inhale it themselves to then blow it into other people's faces?

I just really don't understand where you're coming from or why you would say any of this.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#127

Post by dboreham »

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.

This makes sense if the disease propagates linearly like bacteria on a petri dish. But it probably doesn't. It may spread more like a wildfire -- there can be burning branches blown miles from the main fire that only smolder or set a small patch of grass burning which flames out due to lack of fuel. Meanwhile the main fire is only stopped by water or other major geographic feature.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#128

Post by Metacelsus »

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.

Gene-drive to edit wild animals so that they don't express PRNP (or express a stabilized version)

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#129

Post by dboreham »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #116
satysin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The BBC were definitely covering it in late December 2019 - I distinctly remember the TV coverage on New Years Eve.

btw this is where the "19" comes from.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#130

Post by sokoloff »

fao_ wrote: post #97
giantg2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Bleach works as surface decontamination agent. They know it works for CWD, and I expect it works for others too. I remember reading that nothing but incineration would work in the context of Food-and-Mouth disease, but it seems modern techniques in brain surgery do use bleach. Interesting. Essentially, the only thing that works is disintegrating the prions. You can't wash them off, since you're simply washing them…

For brain surgery, it seems like washing them off the implements and into the water cycle is still an enormous win in terms of risk.
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