161–170 of 311 posts
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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
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…
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…
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…
Knowing what we know about the practices of most US beef farms and the countless USDA failures in both detection and enforcement of rules/regulations meant to protect the consumer, I think it's the wise path to take for everyone living here.
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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?
Which makes sense I guess but it's also scary.
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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.
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Did prions survive cooking? I'd have thought cooking the beef would have killed them.
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…
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I lived through it. I mean, it was scary, but the risks were low. I remember my landlord and his girlfriend at the time saying they were going to give up beef due to the risks. They said this whilst smoking cigarettes.
People are so good at ignoring large daily risks and freaking out about tiny unknown risks. Just look how many people are scared of the covid19 vaccines, but take bigger risks in their morning commute. Actually if you just stick to the AstraZenica vaccine with the risk of blood clots - you take a bigger risk just getting out of bed in the morning, even if you never leave the house.
For example let's say the vaccine causes a side effect that appears only two years from now; then you wouldn't necessarily be correct in asserting that the morning commute is more dangerous. By contrast, the morning commute causing an unknown side effect in two years is highly unlikely.
(For the record I'm vaccinated)