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Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

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Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#151

Post by saiya-jin »

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.

There are back-confirmed cases of covid in Italy in September 2019, so the Wuhan incident is definitely not a patient-0 situation (even if it could be a ground-0 location from previous patient-0 situation, but its just a guess and we'll never know).

Given that, having a case in Beijing in November 2019 is entirely plausible

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#152

Post by senthil_rajasek »

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…

There is also a study from 2014 that suggests that prions were not detected in stems even though the roots of wheat plants were exposed to them. I don't know if there is conclusive evidence yet on getting sick by eating a plant based diet.

"This suggests wheat was unable to transport sufficient PrP(TSE) from the roots to the stem to be detectable by the methods employed."

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24509640/

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#153

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

XorNot wrote: post #147
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chemical agents which cause protein-crosslinking would be the preferred method - you can broadly make every side-group reactive and cause them all to stitch together with anything else organic, which tends to inactivate them (makes them a big blob which can't do much). But it's nasty stuff to work with, since it also happily does tons of damage to the proteins making up the humans applying it.

Do you have an example of such a chemical being used to effectively remediate prion contaminated environments?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#154

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Well, prion diseases are very rare in humans (or at least their transmission is rare), and there is no evolutive pressure to create a super-prion that can infect more people, like happens with other pathogens. Thus, the most likely situation is that it will continue to be very rare until we are able to change it into virtually non-existent by technology.

They are a really scary thing, but it's a meteor strike style of scary, nobody really expects it to happen before we can deal with it.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#155

Post by intrasight »

fao_ wrote: post #99
anotha1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save someone else the time, the "ice-nine" referred to in this comment is fictional .

To be fair, "Cat's Cradle" is a famous work of science-fiction

Seminal work of sci-fi, I highly recommend if for no other reason than to get the ice-nine references you'll inevitably come across.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#156

Post by forgotmypw17 »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #131
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that, and what do you mean by "agricultural source"?

Well water contamination is common and people are increasingly neglecting to test on a regular schedule. One of the symptoms listed is gastrointestinal upset which makes me think it could be something that was ingested. They mention that Roger’s condition has stabilized now that he’s in a care home, tenuous but it seems location change resulted in change in progression of symptoms. By agricultural I mean waste from l…

Which of these is isolated to agriculture pollution, but not industrial pollution?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#158

Post by jtdev »

admash wrote: post #149
admash wrote: post #141

Compounding USDA's lax practices has been its refusal to allow beef processors to independently test cattle for mad cow disease. In 2004, Creekstone Farms, a Kansas processor of black Angus beef with a large Japanese clientele, asked for permission to test its 300,000 cattle for BSE using a $500,000 testing site it had built to USDA specifications. But the agency ruled that the BSE test was licensed only for "surveil…

The “fun” question is whether prions are present in milk and other dairy products. One might argue that they are not, by virtue of them being largely localized to neural tissue. Of course, this raises the question of how CWD is being transmitted in elk, since elk don’t eat elk. “Scientists believe CWD proteins (prions) likely spread between animals through body fluids like feces, saliva, blood, or urine, either throu…

Prions persist in soil for years; elk eat where other elk have deposited prions.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#159

Post by jtdev »

reaperducer wrote: post #150
admash wrote: post #141

Compounding USDA's lax practices has been its refusal to allow beef processors to independently test cattle for mad cow disease. In 2004, Creekstone Farms, a Kansas processor of black Angus beef with a large Japanese clientele, asked for permission to test its 300,000 cattle for BSE using a $500,000 testing site it had built to USDA specifications. But the agency ruled that the BSE test was licensed only for "surveil…

Considering the history of the meat industry, I'm OK with not allowing the farms to police themselves.

Considering the history of the USDA, I’m not okay with the USDA having final say in determining what I or my family put on the dinner table.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#160

Post by spoonjim »

jtdev wrote: post #158
admash wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “fun” question is whether prions are present in milk and other dairy products. One might argue that they are not, by virtue of them being largely localized to neural tissue. Of course, this raises the question of how CWD is being transmitted in elk, since elk don’t eat elk. “Scientists believe CWD proteins (prions) likely spread between animals through body fluids like feces, saliva, blood, or urine, either throu…

Prions persist in soil for years; elk eat where other elk have deposited prions.

Years? Oh jeez. The soil is covered with brain eating murder proteins?
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