France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by Dah00n » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

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…

>affecting 751 people in total.

That is not how terror is defined though. The amount affected by terrorism is the amount of people that get terrorised by the act, not the amount that gets sick, dies or know someone who did. Using your definition 9/11 only affected aprox. 10.000 people but in reality if cased mass hysteria and fear in the US (and elsewhere) that is still there today.

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

#282

Post by Dah00n » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #262

quenix wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit, 5 minutes soaked ? That's intense

Well, that is 40% household bleach. We could probably make a solution that disinfects faster.

Disinfects a cut thumb faster?

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

#283

Post by Dah00n » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #51

Kinda a morbid question but could you just sever the finger moments after the prick? Or would the blood pump so fast that the prion(s) is already in your body.

>would the blood pump so fast that the prion(s) is already in your body.

Well, I guess the question is "is it in the blood yet or not". As someone who have had lots of stuff injected into his veins multiple times (cancer treatment) I can state for a fact the from injection until pretty much full body exposure can be counted in seconds on one hand. I'm not a doctor but my guess is it would only work if you cut the finger off pretty much instantly (counting from the time it enters the bloodstream). Of course it would take longer from a small cut than injected into the big pipes. I wouldn't trust it to work after a few seconds though.

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

#284

Post by disabled » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #271

disabled wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that the researcher was only 23 years old at the time when the lab accident happened. In some ways, she was basically a kid. As everyone knows, she ended up dying because of this. A human has a fully developed adult brain around age 25, but for some people it is not until age 30 [1]. [1] https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain?rebelltitem=1#re...

I wonder how much time you would have to sever your finger if you get poked by a tainted forcep?

That’s beyond the point. I am saying this as somebody with type 1 diabetes who has to poke themself with needles to draw blood daily.

Her finger most likely got lanced, by a very thin forcep tip. It was never about “severing”.

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

#285

Post by andrewjl » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #198

varispeed wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because many researchers put their ego first over the science? It's so many times that they ridicule ideas, that often amounts to bullying and then they rarely even say sorry when it turns out they were wrong. Why won't academia flush out these types of people? The toxic atmosphere with no way of getting rid of bad apples is what put me off from studying.

It’s because discovering something completely new and unheard of that isn’t even hinted at hy any existing theory is extremely rare. Most people with such claims turn out to be wrong, doing bad experiments, fudging data, or worse. The scientific community is resistent to such things because 90% of the time they are right to be resistant, the hypothesis is conclusively disproven, and we never hear about it again. Some…

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Perhaps the single best heuristic for judging any type of objective claim.

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

#286

Post by metiscus » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #161

bvm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about prions. I think there's a mistake in the article, her website goes into more detail: https://soutien-a-emilie0.webnode.fr/lhistoire/ (gtranslate) > Emilie is therefore working that day on samples of mice infected with strains of human prions. It is important to stress here that these were human strains and not animal strains, the species barrier no longer protecting, the infectivity o…

> Emilie travaille donc ce jour là sur des échantillons de souris infectées avec des souches de prions humaines. ll est important de souligner ici qu'il s'agissait de souches humaines et non de souches animales, la barrière d'espèce ne protégeant plus, l'infectiosité des pathogènes manipulés par Emilie était donc totale. (In case anyone else wanted to double-check the translation.)

It's been a bit since I took french but that looks pretty good to me.

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

#287

Post by subroutine » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 12:54 AM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #270

subroutine wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proteins have a half life of ~24 hours. CJD has an incubation period of roughly 10 years. If de novo PrP synthesis was somehow halted, the likelihood of developing CJD would drop to zero. On the other hand whatever job PrP was doing will also cease getting done, and its downstream pathways will be disrupted. So there are likely consequences. Now if you could totally shut down PrP synthesis for like a week, then turn…

> Proteins have a half life of ~24 hours. All of them? I admit that I'm not a biologist, so that's new to me, but this would seem to put our bodies under immense stress if we had to replace half of all our proteins every day. If the average human body has 10 kg of proteins, this would mean the necessity of synthesizing 5 kg per day to prevent your death. Or is this specifically about PrP? If it's true that it doesn't…

There is certainly a large standard deviation on that 24 hour average. Some proteins might last a few days. But we are talking on the order of days vs. the disease which takes on the order of years to manifest. Anyway I assume that the disease manifests as a result of bad PrP accumulation (much like how tau and Abeta protein accumulation eventually results in Alzheimer's disease; in fact Abeta has been described as having "prion like" properties regarding how Abeta clusters beget more clusters). So as soon as you shut down PrP synthesis, I doubt CJD could manifest, even if the current PrP in your body was immortal.

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

#288

Post by metiscus » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 12:54 AM UTC

disabled wrote: post #284

oh_sigh wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much time you would have to sever your finger if you get poked by a tainted forcep?

That’s beyond the point. I am saying this as somebody with type 1 diabetes who has to poke themself with needles to draw blood daily. Her finger most likely got lanced, by a very thin forcep tip. It was never about “severing”.

I think the point was, if you were injected with the prion in a finger, how long would you have to sever that finger to prevent the prion from entering the rest of your body.

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

#289

Post by Johnny555 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:10 AM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #254

Johnny555 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not unless someone is literally sneezing their brains out.

There's still uncertainty about whether or not CJD can be spread through blood transfusions, but if it is spread through blood, and the sneezer also has a bloody nose, well there's the aerosol transmission.

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

#290

Post by XorNot » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:17 AM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #190

XorNot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you should: because all you have otherwise is a death rate that could be caused by any number of things. Biological organisms die all the time for all sorts of reasons: there's a difference between showing a series of factors lead to an death rate, and proposing the specific mechanism by which that happens and it's important . That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through whic…

Clearly you do not need to know the mechanism by which light waves propagate to prove that light waves do propagate. It would be ass-backwards to wait until special relativity was formulated to accept the existence of electromagnetic waves.

Showing you have an infectious agent in a vial is not showing what that agent is.