101–110 of 305 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Scary. I think and airborne human transmissible prion disease that kill in a few years is the kind of event that can bring our society back to prehistoric living in just a few decades. Hope it never happens.
Is this even possible? By what mechanism could a prion disease become airborne? Viruses have evolved to more easily infect cells in the respiratory tract for this specific purpose, but prions are much less sophisticated. It seems there may be some evidence they can evolve, but enough to hijack cellular machinery in such a way that they could increase the concentration in the respiratory tract enough to transmit? Seem…
> She had not been trained in handling dangerous prions or responding to accidents and did not wear both metal mesh and surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien Bensimhon, the family’s lawyer. The thumb should have been soaked in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, Bensimhon adds. Does bleach even affect proteins? Isn't that protocol for an organism you're afraid of?
yes, bleach kills microorganisms by denaturing their proteins.
> She had not been trained in handling dangerous prions or responding to accidents and did not wear both metal mesh and surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien Bensimhon, the family’s lawyer. The thumb should have been soaked in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, Bensimhon adds. Does bleach even affect proteins? Isn't that protocol for an organism you're afraid of?
Scary. I think and airborne human transmissible prion disease that kill in a few years is the kind of event that can bring our society back to prehistoric living in just a few decades. Hope it never happens.
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…
“ vCJD or “classic” CJD, which is not known to be caused by prions from animals. Classic CJD strikes an estimated one person per million. Some 80% of cases are sporadic, meaning they have no known cause, ” Who knows really. 10 years is a long time to wait and worry, but it can take up to 50 years to express itself. Just imagine spending your whole life worrying about this.
Wikipedia thinks otherwise.
The whole UK population was eating mad cow for years until humans started dying.
It was well known in advance that this was a crazy callous risk taken by uk.gov
Careful what you read, the UK spend a lot of money on propaganda at the time (to support beef exports) until the case was well and truly lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Terror" is the point of "terrorism". It's in the word.
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…
> Basically, you get infected, you die. Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...
Apparently 1 in 2,000 people in the UK may be infected.[0]
We still don't know if there's going to be a second wave of disease from infections from that time period due to genetic factors influencing incubation of the disease.
This is why people who were in the UK for longer than a few months during the 80s and 90s aren't allowed to give blood in various places around the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles. That's literally the desired effect. What you're thiking of is war.
> It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions
Its not the right way to infect millions of people. It does not scale. Therefore not effective.