Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would the delivery system be? Waterborne? Food-borne?
(I read the OP comment as sarcasm.)
Also sarcasm
Prions
51–60 of 184 posts
Re: Prions
#52Counterpoint: The Fore people of NZ had kuru from ritual cannibalism. Then they stopped. Eventually, the disease stopped too. Prions are nasty, but we've had 3.5 billion years of protein folding and none of it has ended the world yet.
Globalization is a fairly new thing (on the 3.5B year timescale at least), allowing for the spread of any disease quickly. Whereas isolation and evolution has saved us in the past, it might not have the necessary time in the future (imagine if Covid had been even more deadly, for example).
In addition to the points other people made, proteins are really a whole different thing from viruses in terms of numbers. You make so many proteins every moment, at this point every possible screwup has been cooked up somewhere.
Re: Prions
#53Prions 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…
Does your second point suggest that we should avoid eating beef?
I mean, there are a lot of reasons to not to. And I say that as a meat eater.
Re: Prions
#54[flagged]
Read the website of the author of that garbage paper and decide for yourself whether you feel like it’s a good decision to broadcast it to a wider audience:
vaccines.net
> We are concerned that the current outbreak of COVID-19 is actually a bioweapon attack and may be linked to the US anthrax attack of 2001, which originated from the US army base Fort Detrick.
> The former FBI agent in charge of the US anthrax attack investigation, Richard Lambert, alleged that his superiors acted to inhibit his investigation and prematurely closed the case after it was determined the anthrax used for the attack came from Fort Detrick. This revelation (see this link) as well as Dr. Classen's first hand experience working 3 years at Dr. Tony Fauci's NIAID leads him to be more than concerned that there is a contingent in the US government that is not acting in the public interest regarding bioweapons. Classen notes NIAID received substantial funds for bioweapons research after the domestic anthrax attack . He considers this quite alarming given activities he observed at NIAID and the relationship he observed between people at NIAID and the nearby Fort Detrick.
Re: Prions
#55Prions 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…
Does your second point suggest that we should avoid eating beef?
I think there's better arguments than a risk of prion disease for cutting beef (or meat in general) from your diet - not sure if your comment is meant as a joke that I'm not catching, so I'll hold out on going into details unless you're interested :-)
Re: Prions
#56Earlier 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 hasn't jumped to humans ever, correct?
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Re: Prions
#57So one of the oldest known prion diseases is a disease of sheep called scrapie. It is not transmissible to humans, thankfully.
It turns out that there is genetic resistance to it. There's a specific gene, of which there are two forms, called Q and R. If a sheep is Q-Q, it has no resistance. If it is Q-R is has some resistance. If it is R-R it is completely immune.
All of which is to say: we should not just assume that exposure to prions results in a 100% disease rate, nor should we assume that prion disease itself has a 100% mortality rate. Because the diagnosis for prion disease is clinical. In other words, we only know someone has the prion if they show signs of the disease. And we only look for the disease once someone starts showing significant signs of disease. But there is no test that shows that you ave been exposed, nor is there a test that shows you have been infected but that your infection is spreading so slowly that (say) prostate cancer or heart disease will kill you long before the prion does.
Re: Prions
#58Could this explain why everyone seems to be getting dumber? Have we all been infected by prions already and our brains are decaying?
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Re: Prions
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is spot on (I'm a former prion researcher).
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 in the tongue, and grazing animals are likely to be able to pass the protein down to the ground via the saliva. Scrapie and bse are cross-transmissible
Incidentally, you probably shouldn't eat beef tongue.
Re: Prions
#60Prions 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…
> Most importantly, viruses and bacteria innately "want" to spread. Prions do not have any biological mechanism for their own propagation - they are just an unfortunate mistake of nature. And this seems to be key why there has never been a massive prion outbreak. I disagree here, and but it's not fatal to your argument. Anything that reliably reproduces "wants" to. Hell, I bet prions can evolve too on large enough ti…
In order to evolve there has to be some kind of genetic information passed on to descendants. But for prions there is no such mechanism. A lower energy state is assumed and that's that.