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Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

bbc.com

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Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#281

Post by littlestymaar »

Teever wrote: post #246
littlestymaar wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biotech as a whole and its misuse by fanatics (or public servants in states with dubious moral …) is a massive concern for the 21th century, but I don't really think prions deserve a special place in this list. There's way too much scary things in here (gene drive, artificial viruses, intentional smallpox spreading, etc.)

That may be the case but it's a different issue than "Why are prions more of a threat to humanity than they were 4k years ago?" With that said I sort of disagree with you. Prions are particularly attractive to a hypothetical bioterrorist due to the difficulty in detecting them, their durability and also the delay on effects. As I said above, once you know you have a problem it will be too late. Keep in mind these are…

> hypothetical bioterrorist due to the difficulty in detecting them, their durability and also the delay on effects.

Terrorism is about fear, and that comes with spectacular actions even if it kills relatively few people, not with stealthy poisoning of big population.

You're not gonna have anything remotely as impactful as 9/11 with prions, even if you killed a million people in the long run.

Is it a good weapon for a nation state going at war, or committing a genocide. Definitely yes! But it sucks for terrorism.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#282

Post by Google234 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #227
eganp wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk of cow->human BSE transmission is infinitesimal. Species barriers in prions are surprisingly strong and, for practical purposes, nearly impermeable [0]. In fact, the Prion Protein (PrP) in humans causes multiple distinct diseases including CJD, Kuru, and FFI. Infectious prion confirmations are probably highly influenced by glycosylation [1,2]. Even if this testing wasn't god awfully slow, it's unclear one le…

>The risk of cow->human BSE transmission is infinitesimal. I don't think your sources support this conclusion. bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) rarely passes the species barrier, but it is difficult, if not impossible to estimate what the rate is in the absence of mitigations.

Don’t we know already? In the UK weren’t millions of cows infected and eaten for years with only a few hundred human transmissions?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#283

Post by Google234 »

bigcorp-slave wrote: post #241
eganp wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk of cow->human BSE transmission is infinitesimal. Species barriers in prions are surprisingly strong and, for practical purposes, nearly impermeable [0]. In fact, the Prion Protein (PrP) in humans causes multiple distinct diseases including CJD, Kuru, and FFI. Infectious prion confirmations are probably highly influenced by glycosylation [1,2]. Even if this testing wasn't god awfully slow, it's unclear one le…

What you are saying is dangerous. We had a serious set of exactly these transmission events in Britain only a few decades ago. Clearly the risk is not infinitesimal.

Didn’t a huge number of cows get infected back then with only a small number of cases?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#285

Post by Google234 »

creamytaco wrote: post #165
admash wrote: post #141

Compounding USDA's lax practices has been its refusal to allow beef processors to independently test cattle for mad cow disease. In 2004, Creekstone Farms, a Kansas processor of black Angus beef with a large Japanese clientele, asked for permission to test its 300,000 cattle for BSE using a $500,000 testing site it had built to USDA specifications. But the agency ruled that the BSE test was licensed only for "surveil…

I stopped eating US beef many years ago for this very reason. The Japanese are not stupid and it's quite obvious that something fishy is going on. Knowing what we know about the practices of most US beef farms and the countless USDA failures in both detection and enforcement of rules/regulations meant to protect the consumer, I think it's the wise path to take for everyone living here.

Q. Why can't we test all beef for BSE safety?

A. BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to see if the infectious agent is present. We know that the earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2-to-3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms. The time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Since most cattle that go to slaughter in the United States are both young and clinically normal, testing all slaughter cattle for BSE might offer misleading assurances of safety to the public.

The BSE surveillance program is not for the purposes of determining food safety. Rather, it is an animal health surveillance program. USDA's BSE surveillance program allows USDA to detect the disease if it exists at very low levels in the U.S. cattle population and provides assurances to consumers and our international trading partners that the interlocking system of safeguards in place to prevent BSE are working.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#287

Post by Y_Y »

todd8 wrote: post #266
dcolkitt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet. That implies a low chance that it'll happen anytime in the near future. There's no evidence that any significant human population has ever been wiped out by prions at any point in the history of the species. Heck, we haven't even observed widespread (>10% infected) prion disease in any species. At least with something like climate chang…

> The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet. Well a prion disease (called Kuru) did affect the Fore people of New Guinea seriously in the 1950s and 1960s as I recall. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Fore people: > Furthermore, Kuru predominantly affected women, as women more commonly partook in cannibalistic religious rituals. Because of this, there was a significant sex i…

Did you read about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel by any chance?

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#288

Post by CryptoPunk »

rapind wrote: post #240
macksd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a pretty fundamental difference between "allowing farms to police themselves" and actually prohibiting them from doing voluntary testing for diseases. I would compare it to the difference between eliminating a need for prescriptions and prohibiting people from getting screened for skin cancer on the regular. Is there a better reason to prohibit voluntary testing than what is included in the article?

Are they being prohibited from testing though, or just prohibited from making safety claims based on those tests?

Prohibited from testing.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#289

Post by todd8 »

Y_Y wrote: post #287
todd8 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simplest counterpoint to prion cataclysm fear is that it hasn't happened yet. Well a prion disease (called Kuru) did affect the Fore people of New Guinea seriously in the 1950s and 1960s as I recall. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Fore people: > Furthermore, Kuru predominantly affected women, as women more commonly partook in cannibalistic religious rituals. Because of this, there was a significant sex i…

Did you read about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel by any chance?

I do have the book, it's quite interesting, but I read about Kuru while it was still thought to be caused by an infectious virus. My recollection is a bit vague, but I believe it was in Time or Newsweek during the 1960s.

It was a scary sounding disease so I remembered it when years later it was discovered to be caused by prions and reported in The New York Times.

Re: Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

#290

Post by dnautics »

slashdev wrote: post #261
dnautics wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. The vaccines are by definition new and untested. That the blood clots appeared suggests that the unknown surface area of the vaccine is higher than we expected; whereas the almost all of the risk on your commute are known and preventable. For example let's say the vaccine causes a side effect that appears only two years from now; then you wouldn't necessarily be correct in asserting that the morning commu…

The risks on your morning commute are not preventable by effort on your part. You can drive with care, but there is still substantial risk no matter what. Unknown but remote risks with any vaccine are really quite substantially less dangerous than the known and quantifiable risk of your commute. We're talking like three orders of magnitude or more which leaves a lot of room for unknown risks.

> Unknown but remote risks with any vaccine are really quite substantially less dangerous

How the hell can you say anything with confidence about an "unknown risk"? It's unknown.

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