111–120 of 184 posts
This guy is trying really, really hard, wildly inflating our susceptibility, our risk, the vectors by which prions can be transmitted, everything. I hope I never sit next to him on a long plane flight.
That can be generalized to any journalist or media organization. Their currency is fear.
Prions are misfolded proteins. Because of mutations our proteins have tiny variations in them and it should not surprise me if some of them are more prone to misfolding than others. Currently it barely matters, but in a world rampant with prions, wouldn't we evolve more stable ones?
Evolution doesn't do magic. You could just as well ask, "in a world with solar UV rays, wouldn't we evolve cancer resistance?"
Cancer mainly takes the old, and is certainly no threat to the survival of mankind.
Prions are misfolded proteins. Because of mutations our proteins have tiny variations in them and it should not surprise me if some of them are more prone to misfolding than others. Currently it barely matters, but in a world rampant with prions, wouldn't we evolve more stable ones?
Evolution doesn't do magic. You could just as well ask, "in a world with solar UV rays, wouldn't we evolve cancer resistance?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If COVID were more deadly like Ebola it tends to not have long gestation periods where it can be spread without symptoms.
tends to is not going to cut it in this instance. If 99% of diseases are either easy to spread, or deadly, we still need to worry about the 1% that are both. It only takes one such disease to cause a wipeout like event.
I think we'd probably handle a more severe disease with much less flippancy than we did COVID and we'd have to treat lockdown and other tools with much more reverence in such a situation.
This does happen with Ebola outbreaks being managed in Africa now so if they can do it there I think we can do it here.
>The anti-globalist movement of the 90s is long dead. The far-left which fueled it has been co-opted, down to the level of its language and internalized identities, by global business interests. Coordinators of anarchist riots appear in Forbes; there are anarchist professors and journalists. No citations Lots of fear Thinly veiled far right rhetoric
But perhaps horseshoe theory strikes again.
So, is it because prions managed to attain a lower energy configuration than similar proteins, forcing them to reconfigure themselves upon contact with a prion, causing a cascade of protein deformation that is super stable and can't be reversed? Like protein configuration = local minimum, prion configuration = global minimum?
I remember that in the 90s, when "mad cow disease" was dominating the headlines, it was predicted that there would be an exponential increase in cases, decades down the line. The same point about prions being virtually indestructible was being made, the same concerns about surgical equipment and blood donations were raised. Suffice it to say, the prion disaster did not materialize, so I'm skeptical about the same sto…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former prion researcher, do you eat meat or do you have reservations around that?
I don't have reservations about it. I'm also not generally afraid to die.
Glad to hear you aren't generally afraid to die though - sounds like a good stance to have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you make of CWD? That one scares me more than current known human prion disease. Mainly because it seems to spread really easily. Other prion diseases seem to practically require cannibalism to spread.
Cwd is essentially the same as bse and cjd and scrapie. It's actually the one that you have to worry about the least. For unknown reasons, there is not species crossover between deer and cow/sheep/humans (I was briefly investigating the molecular mechanisms for this but finished my phd before getting results). As for why the grazing animals can spread prion, my guess is that the prion protein is highly concentrated i…
According to the CDC, CWD is spread NOT just through saliva, but also feces, blood, urine, etc.
In addition, it CAN spread to Squirrel monkeys. The long-term affects on macaques is still being established (on of the reasons kuru took so long to discover was that it took decades for the monkey to develop symptoms).
If exposure is dangerous to humans, what could we do? In the areas it has been in, it is spread everywhere the deer travel as they shed bodily fluids into the soil.