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Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

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Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#251

Post by cwkoss »

dcolkitt wrote: post #125
codingbeer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chang…

If a significant human population was wiped out in history - how would we know it was prions?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#252

Post by gojomo »

mannerheim wrote: post #201
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…

This is an incomplete description of the USDA's rationale. Although I agree that there shouldn't be a ban on private testing, the USDA's position is that BSE testing is ineffective at the time most cows are slaughtered, and would therefore provide an unwarranted impression of safety. > NOT A FOOD SAFETY TEST > BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to s…

This is the same error the CDC & FDA made in the early stages of COVID, insisting on fussy rationed tests based on hand-wavy ideas about public misinterpretation. That error likely contributed to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths by hiding initial community spread for a month or more.

Mass testing, even testing that's mostly at a stage unlikely to detect anything, and only occasionally on less-typical older animals, will provide new useful info. Waiting to test until an a old symptomatic cow "most likely to have the disease" shows up is closing the barn door after the mad cows have already escaped.

The USDA's logic is dangerous like the bureaucratic rationing of COVID tests, early on. At crucial times in early 2020, no matter how suspicious a case/death, and how well it fit COVID symptoms, if the patient hadn't returned from Wuhan in the last few weeks, a test was prohibited. That's a "we don't want to know" policy.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#253

Post by regularfry »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #138
regularfry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... wouldn't work. Consent must be continually given, and for Capgras to work you can't be aware it's a delusion at the time you're experiencing it.

I think the idea is that if you wanted to spice up a marriage with an affair, you could use this to "cheat" on your spouse with your spouse. Both parties would be consenting the whole time. One would just think they are cheating.

Oh, I understand the concept. It's broken. If I am "consenting", but not to the action that's actually happening, I am not, in fact, consenting. If I believe that I am consenting to sex with someone that's not my husband, in that moment I am not consenting to sex with my husband. If they then have sex with me, knowing that that is my state of mind, that is non-consensual.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#254

Post by NoSorryCannot »

fao_ wrote: post #175
sokoloff wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure you understand how irresponsible that is.

Do you understand how irresponsible it is? It might be but it's obvious. How common are prions? How many prions get into the water cycle already? Prions probably don't go through the water cycle's gas phase. Are we worried about seafood? Surely lots of prions end up in oceans and lakes already.

It sounds a bit scary but it's not clear that it would change the risk profile.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#255

Post by mannerheim »

throwaway_isms wrote: post #248
mannerheim wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incomplete description of the USDA's rationale. Although I agree that there shouldn't be a ban on private testing, the USDA's position is that BSE testing is ineffective at the time most cows are slaughtered, and would therefore provide an unwarranted impression of safety. > NOT A FOOD SAFETY TEST > BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to s…

The rational middle ground would be to allow the private testing, but regulate any advertising or marketing of the testing and/or results on the basis it would likely confuse the consumers. If the interest in private testing magically disappears, then the intent is clear and might be a valuable factor for the consumers who might reasonably conclude the private company only had interest in performing testing they knew…

It's unclear whether or not that's actually prohibited. It looks like Creekstone was the only beef processor who desired to test for BSE, and this was based on them wanting to export their beef to Japan. The rejection was made on this basis.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#256

Post by Sophistifunk »

fao_ wrote: post #173
anotha1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For which generation?

Are there many noteworthy modern science fiction authors that hold up to the Asimov / Clarke / Lem generation? I would think someone reasonably versed in science fiction would have at least heard of it -- I'm a "zoomer" and I have.

Peter F Hamilton. Start with Pandora's Star if you want more Asimovish, or Reality Dysfunction if you want it more Lemmy \m/.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#257

Post by mannerheim »

gojomo wrote: post #252
mannerheim wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incomplete description of the USDA's rationale. Although I agree that there shouldn't be a ban on private testing, the USDA's position is that BSE testing is ineffective at the time most cows are slaughtered, and would therefore provide an unwarranted impression of safety. > NOT A FOOD SAFETY TEST > BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to s…

This is the same error the CDC & FDA made in the early stages of COVID, insisting on fussy rationed tests based on hand-wavy ideas about public misinterpretation. That error likely contributed to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths by hiding initial community spread for a month or more. Mass testing, even testing that's mostly at a stage unlikely to detect anything, and only occasionally on less-typical older…

> Mass testing, even testing that's mostly at a stage unlikely to detect anything, and only occasionally on less-typical older animals, will provide new useful info.

What useful information does it provide? Is there any evidence that testing can detect BSE before symptoms appear? Japan had tested clinically healthy cows until 2017, when they decided to limit testing to symptomatic cows.[0]

> Waiting to test until an a old symptomatic cow "most likely to have the disease" shows up is closing the barn door after the mad cows have already escaped.

Obviously it would be ideal to detect BSE in cows that are younger and not yet symptomatic. But if there's no evidence that this can be done, testing provides a false assurance of safety. Testing older, symptomatic cows will at least give an estimate as to the prevalence of BSE and an indication as to whether safety measures are working.

It's much ado about nothing, anyway, since the US has only ever had four cases of vJCD from BSE, and in each case the individual had spent large amounts of time in countries known for having tainted beef. Perhaps dementia cases are misdiagnosed, but if there were a large danger of BSE/vCJD, one would expect to see those symptoms in a great deal of younger people.

[0]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/japan-japan-lift-age-based-bse...

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#258

Post by Sophistifunk »

omgwtfbbq wrote: post #233
shkkmo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a number of very good modern science fiction authors that easily rival them. While none of them may be as iconic, I think that has more to do with competition in the genre and breadth of the market.

Name some? My experience with authors like Cixin Liu and some contemporaries is that they are unreadable, this could just be bad translations in Liu's case but I'm not at all convinced modern writers rival the classical greats in SciFi.

FWIW either the writing or translation seems to get better as 3BP progresses.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#259

Post by jonnycomputer »

So what I've read, suggests that prions do not degrade in the environment very readily. A deer with prion disease can die, decompose, then the prions be absorbed into the vegetation to be re-transmitted to other deer. Naively it would seem that there could be an ongoing accumulation of prions in the environment.

This makes me think of fire policy. Although prions are resistant to temperatures of 200C or so, wildfires often reach much higher temperatures. It would seem, again naively, that a regular regime of fire (e.g. controlled burns) might curtail any such accumulation (as well as have benefits to fire-adapted and fire-dependent plant species). I'm not sure if controlled burns are ever allowed to get that hot though.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#260

Post by jonnycomputer »

colechristensen wrote: post #40
StavrosK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought 200C for an hour was enough.
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