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France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

sciencemag.org

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Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#31

Post by ekianjo »

jamespwilliams wrote: post #17

Hm: "long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a cryostat—a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures—that she used to slice brain sections from transgenic mice infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE . She pierced two layers of latex gloves and drew blood" Later in the article: ""We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep…

"infect" is not the right word. Prions are not viruses, they do not replicate, they ravage other proteins in their surroundings by misfolding them over and over again until it becomes a fatal pathology.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#33

Post by reubenswartz »

choeger wrote: post #25
Tsarbomb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an excellent way of thinking about them. For anyone unfamiliar, OP is referring to the Kurt Vonnegut novel which has a fictional state of water (ice-nine) that immediately freezes all other water it comes into contact with into more ice-nine. Edit: I committed a sin and didn't mention the title: Cat's Cradle.

There must be some kind of counter-agent, or life as we know it would not exist.

The counter-agent is that it's fictional. ;-) (We hope.)

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#34

Post by tyingq »

Omavel wrote: post #29
chrbarrol wrote: post #23

Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon? It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years after the contamination started. Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

bio-terrorism is not effective.

What's "effective" mean in this context? The anthrax letters in the US in 2001 certainly dominated news cycles.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#35

Post by ekianjo »

chrbarrol wrote: post #23

Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon? It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years after the contamination started. Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

if you want to kill lots people thats pretty much the worst way of doing it.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#36

Post by jamespwilliams »

ekianjo wrote: post #31
jamespwilliams wrote: post #17

Hm: "long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a cryostat—a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures—that she used to slice brain sections from transgenic mice infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE . She pierced two layers of latex gloves and drew blood" Later in the article: ""We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep…

"infect" is not the right word. Prions are not viruses, they do not replicate, they ravage other proteins in their surroundings by misfolding them over and over again until it becomes a fatal pathology.

The word "prion" is actually a contraction of the words "protein" and "infection". (edit: although I agree it's not what one might conventionally think of as an "infection")

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#37

Post by bb123 »

Reventlov wrote: post #5

From Wikipedia [1]: « Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several atal and transmissible neuro degenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of conferring infectious properties, collapsing…

Well we don't really know that, because diagnosis is normally confirmed post-mortem. There could be many people walking around infected with prions that show no symptoms at all.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#38

Post by overlordalex »

chrbarrol wrote: post #23

Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon? It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years after the contamination started. Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

I've always thought a _very_ effective strategy would be to get a crop-duster and spray a prion-contaminated mist over a major city, basically contaminating every public surface in a large area

I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards - do you remove the surface of everything in your city?

To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale, think about the terrorism aspect - imagine not being able to interact with any surface? It would be like a permanent covid lockdown on the area

The psychological effect of a large-scale area-denial would be massive

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#39

Post by throwaway0a5e »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #22
meepmorp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypochlorous acid denatures proteins, so yeah.

But wasn't there an issue before of prion contamination with surgical instruments used in ophtalmic surgery. I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed at some ridiculous pH value, no?

>I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed at some ridiculous pH value, no?

Probably not until they had reason to do so.

"Hot acidic environment" is hell when it comes to corrosion and the engineering incentive for medical stuff is only to be as corrosion resistant as you need because there are other design considerations and the most corrosion resistant stainless steels are not the bet fit for building a super precise needle you're gonna poke around in someone's eye so you wind up wanting to pick a middle ground alloy. Picking a middle ground alloy puts a hard limit on what you can do to clean your instruments before you degrade them in unacceptably short order.

I don't know how things have changed since. My medical manufacturing experience is out of date and limited.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#40

Post by ekianjo »

tyingq wrote: post #34
Omavel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bio-terrorism is not effective.

What's "effective" mean in this context? The anthrax letters in the US in 2001 certainly dominated news cycles.

And killed very few people. That's what we call terrorism (lots of news coverage for very few deaths) - it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles.
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