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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

#141

Post by Johnny555 »

rs999gti wrote: post #73
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…

> Basically, you get infected, you die. Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...

And avoid being in the same room with someone that’s been infected:

In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols

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

#142

Post by fallingknife »

frob wrote: post #80
fallingknife wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you audit processes when the allegation is that someone got infected because she wasn't following the processes?

It's so that they can figure out why the process wasn't being followed and how it can be improved. Nothing is perfect and accidents are a great catalyst for reexamining your procedures. What could change to make it more likely that the process would be followed? Could we put signs all around places with prion research? Could we implement a buddy system whenever we work with prions? Do metal gloves need to be hung in…

The last thing you need is more bureaucracy. If you want the rules to be followed, you punish the people who don't. That's it. It doesn't take 3 months. It doesn't take any audits or committees. If there is a rule following problem, you enforce the rules. People will find a way to comply if they know they will pay the price if they don't.

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

#143

Post by boxed »

jtbayly wrote: post #93
dekhn wrote: post #56

Prions are weird. I was at UCSF during the time they went from a fringe theory to an established fact and a nobel prize. The professor who studied them (Prusiner) had to overcome tons of resistance and the experiments were heroic (often waiting months for mice to die). It's really funny that everybody resisted it until somebody mentioned that there was a plausible physical mechanism of refolding catalysis.

Makes complete sense that there was resistance until a viable mechanism was proposed. Otherwise it just sounds like voodoo.

Not really. Look at how Darwins theory of evolution was published in 1859, while the mechanism wasn't really clear until at earliest 1928, and in some ways it's still not fully understood.

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

#144

Post by ashtonkem »

ta988 wrote: post #2

The article talks about the case of Émilie Jaumain that got contaminated by prion while cleaning a device used to slice mouse brains. She died 9 years later of a prion disease. After several cases of exposure across the world, France decided to block prion research for 3 months to try to study the issue.

At the minimum, some new safety protocols might be needed.

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

#145

Post by Apocryphon »

myWindoonn wrote: post #126
tyingq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The most effective bioterror attack in the USA was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... and it killed zero people, affecting 751 people in total. Bioterror is expensive and difficult. For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment. Spray them onto…

So you just inject them into the food supply?

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

#146

Post by inglor_cz »

triceratops wrote: post #101
ekianjo wrote: post #40

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.

Point of terrorism is achieving a political change through terror. Terror is not the end in itself.

From this point of view, mailing of anthrax in 2001 was very inefficient.

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

#147

Post by fabiospampinato »

jamespwilliams wrote: post #36
ekianjo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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")

What things are named and what they are don't necessarily coincide. E.g.: native americans are called "indians".

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

#148

Post by zzbzq »

missedthecue wrote: post #83
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #9

The study of rare, contagious diseases seems likely enough to result in an eventual outbreak that it should be treated like enriching uranium. Which is to say, with great caution- and not like regular science but rather like the kind of science with potentially very negative externalities.

this is a nitpick, but "negative externality" isn't a synonym for "bad things happening". It describes a market transaction which inherently imposes costs on an unrelated third party. For instance, a steel mill producing rolling stock to sell me releases sulfur into the air that dirties your property, imposing a cost on you. Prion research doesn't necessarily impose costs on anyone.

It's not a nitpick, it's just wrong. Bad things happening is a cost which is both negative and external. The use of the term "negative externality" works here.

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

#149

Post by hef19898 »

yhoneycomb wrote: post #139
M2Ys4U wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avoid eating British beef in the 1980s/1990s, too. 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 aroun…

Serious question should I be avoiding traveling to the UK over this??

No, that was 20-30 years ago.

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

#150

Post by echelon »

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…

When lab workers studying the very thing they know best can make lethal mistakes, it's surprising that so many jumped to quell any hypothesis of a covid lab leak.

Scientists make mistakes all the time. They're human.

Imagine all of the mistakes you make in your job. Outages. Stupid bugs. It's the same with any profession.

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