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Prions

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Re: Prions

#151

Post by thehappypm »

barbazoo wrote: post #137
legitster wrote: post #33

Prions are pretty scary, but I think there are a lot of things this article gets wrong. - Prions are resistant to sterilization (since there is nothing to "kill"), but simple soap and water are still highly effective - Prions don't "last forever". They can live in buried carcasses for a few years, but some studies have shown that even our existing sewage treatment processes already break down a lot of prions. - While…

> I have to imagine that vegans have an incredibly low risk profile for prions. What do you reckon the risk profile of vegetarians would be? Are prions likely to end up in eggs and milk?

In general I think we should be trying to eat foods that are really biologically dissimilar to humans to avoid being sickened by our foods' diseases. Plants and fungi don't seem to cause pandemics. Mammals do (SARS, covid, swine flu, possibly Spanish flu). Birds can make us sick (salmonella). Fish, mollusks, insects, probably safer, parasites aside.

Re: Prions

#152

Post by beiller »

derekp7 wrote: post #47
beiller wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was more deadly it would spread less quickly. That's how diseases work from my vague university memories of an epidemiology course. They are on a spectrum of deadly to contagious.

What actually causes this though? For example, take something like HIV that takes a long time to show symptoms, but have an airborne version of it. Do the things that make viruses airborne also keep them from having a long gestation period and also highly lethal?

I don't think we know what causes it. It is mainly just observed. What causes this is a very active area of study. Probably some output of a "evolutionary" process of how viruii mutate but my knowledge is very little :)

Re: Prions

#153

Post by akiselev »

derekp7 wrote: post #47
beiller wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was more deadly it would spread less quickly. That's how diseases work from my vague university memories of an epidemiology course. They are on a spectrum of deadly to contagious.

What actually causes this though? For example, take something like HIV that takes a long time to show symptoms, but have an airborne version of it. Do the things that make viruses airborne also keep them from having a long gestation period and also highly lethal?

> Do the things that make viruses airborne also keep them from having a long gestation period and also highly lethal?

Surviving airborne before the advent of buildings meant surviving outside in direct sunlight with little in the way of protection from droplets or anything else. Organisms have a limited amount of abstract "evolutionary capital" and the costs, so to speak, of developing adaptations to survive airborne and evade an active immune system are astronomical. It's not impossible, but the two "features" work against each other during the development phase.

Re: Prions

#154

Post by Sebb767 »

derekp7 wrote: post #47
beiller wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was more deadly it would spread less quickly. That's how diseases work from my vague university memories of an epidemiology course. They are on a spectrum of deadly to contagious.

What actually causes this though? For example, take something like HIV that takes a long time to show symptoms, but have an airborne version of it. Do the things that make viruses airborne also keep them from having a long gestation period and also highly lethal?

At least a part of it is probably the human factor. The big "PR" problem we have with fighting the epidemic is that a lot of people won't have much (visible) problems. If COVID would lead to a slow and painful death 99% of the time, there were probably far fewer people trying to get it or using the herd immunity strategy.

Re: Prions

#155

Post by stickfigure »

andy_ppp wrote: post #115
est31 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was going to add a flow up edit to add more clarity to my answer; the point is if 50% of people are dying from an airborne disease, getting to zero is going to be treated with much more importance than COVID with a ~2% (? maybe) fatality rate. People who think masks are a political tool to control us suddenly are less paranoid about that (and vaccines, and social distancing) when the bodies are bing piled up in the…

0.7%, not 2% (according to the US CDC). Which does make it "worse" for the reasons you point out.

Re: Prions

#156

Post by lazide »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #94
derekp7 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What actually causes this though? For example, take something like HIV that takes a long time to show symptoms, but have an airborne version of it. Do the things that make viruses airborne also keep them from having a long gestation period and also highly lethal?

This is such an interesting question, I hope it doesn't get buried before someone knowledgeable answers it. We all know the more aggressive a pathogen is, the more it paints itself into a corner because it's burning its bridges. Something like airborne HIV would be really scary. My guess is that airborne diseases are not weaker, but that evolution has selected for resistance against those because they spread fast amo…

This is unfortunately just not correct in real life. It’s a good representation of general behavior/trends, but for instance Smallpox was around since at least 500 BC, and still had a 35% fatality rate until it was eradicated in the 70s.

The more times you roll the dice, the more often you’ll get that magic combo of lethal and highly transmissible. For the most part it doesn’t favor it, but that just makes it an outlier when it does, not impossible.

Re: Prions

#157

Post by incrudible »

hajile wrote: post #142
incrudible wrote: post #16

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…

Who knows. I'll give you an interesting thought. There is NO single, conclusive test for Alzheimer's disease. The symptoms are almost identical to CJD (human mad cow) with the biggest differentiator being time from diagnosis to death. Even Amyloid-beta plaque buildup is often (though not always) noted in CJD patients [0][2]. Likewise the other Alzheimer's marker tau protein is also elevated in CJD patients [3]. I'd n…

> The symptoms are almost identical to CJD (human mad cow) with the biggest differentiator being time from diagnosis to death.

Ordinary CJD has a much lower median age of death (68 years) than Alzheimer's (88 years), but vCJD (the form that is believed to be caused by contaminated food) has a median age of death of only 28 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise...

A surge in young or middle-aged dementia cases would likely not have fallen under the radar.

> Between 15-30% of Alzheimer's diagnosed patients also don't have the normal Alzheimer's brain symptom (presumably amyloid buildup) either. Alzheimer's as cause of death was 17.6% in 2000, but is now 37.3% in 2020.[1]

You have mistaken the rate of deaths (per 100,000) for the percentage. When judging this increase, one must consider that in the same timeframe, the mean age of the population has risen by 10% and life expectancy increased by more than two years.

Re: Prions

#158

Post by [deleted] »

geophile wrote: post #71

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.

[deleted]

Re: Prions

#160

Post by marsdentech »

newsbinator wrote: post #110

Asking naively: is anybody doing research on good prions: proteins that get other proteins to fold correctly/helpfully, beating out bad prions in the process?

You might be interested in reading about "chaperone proteins"!
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