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.
Prions
71–80 of 184 posts
Re: Prions
#72prion infections are always eventually fatal, there is no cure, and they are contagious. The majority of research into prions happens post mortem, and is usually trying to pin down the cause of death. Statistically, there must be prions that are not lethal. I'm reminded of the issues with people that work at pig processing plants, who had the job of blowing the brains out of the skull cavity with compressed air. Many…
I think that's an interesting point. Do you have a source for your statement, that most of the research happens post mortem?
It makes sense to me that non-lethal cases wouldn't be discovered, as it's probably prohibitively expensive to screen for non-lethal/dormant infections. It could also be that the progression is so slow for most people, that they die from unrelated causes before the disease becomes a problem (this is pure conjecture on my part)
Re: Prions
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
CWD hasn't jumped to humans ever, correct?
They don't really know, but the evidence suggests that it doesn't, or at least hasn't yet. There have been a few studies following up on groups of people who consumed CWD positive deer. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/02/21/zombie...
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Re: Prions
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have no idea if US Beef is infected. The USDA prohibits anyone from testing their cows and ended their spot-testing program (which was a joke). So unlike Europe we never reckoned with the problem and don't know if it is currently spreading. For human exposure we would not yet be far enough along to know if the US Beef supply either is or was contaminated. Personally I have basically stopped eating beef for this re…
If US beef was contaminated, wouldn’t there be thousands of cases of vCJD[1] by now? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Creutzfeldt–Jakob_dise...
Yes there could be. It remains latent for years after consuming the infected meat. Guess we'll find out!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Prions
#75Earlier 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…
"there is not species crossover between deer and cow/sheep/humans"
I thought the theory was that CWD started in a domestic herd that was raised in an area that previously had scrapie infected sheep?
Re: Prions
#76Prions 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?
There's some space for prion evolution, but it's a very small set of possibilities. And more importantly, the little they can evolve, they do so at random, there is no genetic recombination step to merge the selection of unrelated features.
You misread me.
Re: Prions
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For additional context, the author is JB Classen. From his Wikipedia page: > A widely-reposted 2021 Facebook post claiming that the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 could cause prion diseases was based on a paper by Classen. The paper was published in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, whose publisher, Scivision Publishers, is included in Beall's list of publishers of predatory journals. Vincent Racaniello, professo…
A more thorough dismantling of the scientific claims in that paper in case anyone is offended by not addressing the writings of a moron on their merits:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19-vac...
Re: Prions
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
So prions are simply a result of entropy? Am I understanding that correctly?
Re: Prions
#79Counterpoint: 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.
This comment is spot on (I'm a former prion researcher).
How old are these proteins? If the do spread and remain dormant in soil they would have been a threat for entire existence of life on this planet. Exponential growth would only cause every place, especially a bio-reach locations to be full of it as food chain making more and more of the protein and animals remains are not handled in any way in the wild.
Re: Prions
#80Prions 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?"