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Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

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Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#141

Post by chc4 »

A few months ago I was talking at a family gathering and learned that one of my distant relatives has CJD. They're a high-ranking company executive, but their cognition is rapidly wasting away and will be dead within a few years. Another family member that was a nurse in Kentucky(?) said they have a high rate of prion disease due to farmers inhaling contaminated dirt for years.

There are a few comments here about how talking about prion diseases are basically fearmongering. It shook me a bit, though. I always thought of CJD as one of those freak diseases that you hear about in the news, but is such low likely hood that it's basically non-existent. Not so much anymore.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#142

Post by jvanderbot »

tossandturn wrote: post #135
zaarn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick but the step between virus and prion is a viroid; a naked piece of RNA. They mostly exist in plants to my knowledge and are basically the smallest possible infectious disease. The smallest viroids clock in at around 120 base pairs (240 nucleotides).

Prions are like gamma-induced bit flips, Viroids are like small code patches, and Viruses are self-deploying code patches.

What blows my mind is these aren't really analogies, they are in fact mostly truth.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#143

Post by wombatpm »

ffxfire wrote: post #126
OldFatCactus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052957/ iirc, incubation periods can be decades long. I believe the more you injest, the shorter the incubation period

The research article you linked to is for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, not variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Sporadic CJD has no link to brain consumption. Honestly there’s a lot of fear mongering in this thread about brain consumption...if anything it’s healthy for you. The main issues are most likely when the animal eaten has participated in cannibalism. For example, Cows were fed bovine blood meal which is…

Sheep suffer from Scrapie

Scrapie is a fatal, degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of sheep and goats. It is among a number of diseases classified as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). Infected flocks can experience significant production losses.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#144

Post by thfuran »

im3w1l wrote: post #97
thfuran wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can induce correctly-folded proteins to misfold, effectively replicating.

But shouldn't the number of misfolds be very limited or just one so that evolution cannot occur? It almost sounds like fearing that fire will evolve.

I don't know how many conformation changes could plausibly be caused by a prion or how many of them would be stable (and I'd imagine it depends heavily on the protein), but the number of possible conformations is incredibly large for any reasonably large protein.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#145

Post by nwallin »

arkades wrote: post #21
fallingknife wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infectious disease is one area where fear of the unknown is rational. We don't just need to defend against existing diseases, but also diseases yet to emerge. Just because CJD is rare doesn't mean that the next prion disease will be, so it would make sense to take measures to prevent transmission of prions now.

We take measures now, for tissues where prions are a possible transmission risk. The article mis-represented that. But: (1) there are only so many resources to go around. Should we be devoting them to vanishingly rare things rather than things that might actually affect you? (2) prions will never be a wildfire plague. They have little or no tranmissive ability, by nature of being absolutely naked protein. One step up…

> (2) prions will never be a wildfire plague. They have little or no tranmissive ability, by nature of being absolutely naked protein.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) (affects deer) can be transmitted by infected saliva. One of the symptoms of symptoms of CWD is excessive saliva production. It is very transmissible, and is devastating captive populations of deer, although it is relatively rare in the wild.

I think if a similar TSE affected humans, spreadable by infected saliva, it would absolutely be a wildfire plague.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#146

Post by g3cko_ »

arkades wrote: post #10

Prion disease is exceedingly rare. CJD is the most common, with an incidence of 1 per 1,000,000 person-years worldwide, inclusive of all transmission vectors (including medical procedures). Iatrogenic transmission is a rarer subset still: the riskiest transplants (with respect to CJD) are in the central nervous system. The UK tracked their transmission rates from 1970 to 2003 (a long period is needed because surgical…

An incidence of 1 per 1,000,000 may not seem that scary, what are the odds of knowing someone who gets CJD? Obviously, much greater.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#147

Post by stef25 »

chc4 wrote: post #141

A few months ago I was talking at a family gathering and learned that one of my distant relatives has CJD. They're a high-ranking company executive, but their cognition is rapidly wasting away and will be dead within a few years. Another family member that was a nurse in Kentucky(?) said they have a high rate of prion disease due to farmers inhaling contaminated dirt for years. There are a few comments here about how…

> A few months ago I was talking at a family gathering and learned that one of my distant relatives has CJD. They're a high-ranking company executive, but their cognition is rapidly wasting away and will be dead within a few years

Are you sure it's CJD? Article says 95% of CJD patients won't live 12 months after diagnosis.

> Another family member that was a nurse in Kentucky(?) said they have a high rate of prion disease due to farmers inhaling contaminated dirt for years.

What kind of prion disease and what kind of dirt?

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#148

Post by stef25 »

katuskoti wrote: post #60
marsrover wrote: post #4

As someone with anxiety and eye problems, I'm not feeling great.

Same here. I've had strange eye problems that my doctor hasn't been able to explain, and I feel like my cognition is declining. It's easy to buy into unknowns like this which seem to explain everything wrong with you, but it's exceedingly unlikely. More likely is that my eye problems are from wearing contacts in for too long and staring too long at a computer in a low-humidity environment and never blinking. My cogni…

> I've had strange eye problems that my doctor hasn't been able to explain, and I feel like my cognition is declining

Ageing? And basically what you describe. I wouldn't worry about it :)

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#149

Post by lovemenot »

nkurz wrote: post #139
0db532a0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to make it clear that whiddershins was wrong to say that ‘deep seated’ is the correct usage in contrast to ‘deep-seated’ when Oxford, Cambridge and Merriam-Webster say that ‘deep-seated’ is indeed a correct usage. P.S. Inconsistency: I assumed that whiddershins was complaining about the hyphen, rather than correcting ‘seeded’, which had been changed to ‘seated’ by the time I first saw it.

I see. You were pointing out the hyphenation or lack thereof? I think you might have missed that the earlier discussion was regarding "seated" versus "seeded". Thus your brevity made it looked like you were claiming that the "seeded" form was correct. I don't think anyone else was concerned about the hyphenation.

Now we have three variants in the wild. The correctly folded "deep-seated" and its harmless but slightly anomalous "deep seated". Worryingly, there's this new configuration "deep seeded" that a significant but unknown number of HN readers may have been exposed to. Although the original infection source has been neutralised, we must remain vigilant against sporadic recurrence in future.

Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims

#150

Post by NeoBasilisk »

joadha wrote: post #96
ThrowMeDown01 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had strange eye problems that my doctor hasn't been able to explain, and I feel like my cognition is declining You could also explain this with low-level heavy metal exposure, e.g. mercury, as well as a large amount of other possibilities :-) I thought hard if I should write this, as a joke and only the above line at first, but here it goes. Having read your second paragraph too, that is pretty much exactly wh…

Can I ask how you were exposed to mercury?

also really interested in hearing the background
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