3 ms·

If we eradicate it in humans and also people stop eating bushmeat (or including chimpanzees or whatever in that category) then it seems to me like it would be u

If we eradicate it in humans and also people stop eating bushmeat (or including chimpanzees or whatever in that category) then it seems to me like it would be unlikely to make the jump back to humans. This actually raises an interesting question about potential diseases lurking in food sources. We now have 20/20 hindsight that eating an ape caused this and is therefore a bad idea. They obviously didn't know that when they chose to eat apes. There could be other such food sources that we don't know to be problematic yet. I am reminded of prions and mad cow, kind of a similar story.

djsumdog 7y ago
Do prions actually lead to Alzheimer's? I've read a lot of conflicting articles on that lately.
- austinjp 7y ago
  Prions do lead to certain degenerative brain diseases. Alzheimer's is caused by different factors, though. Perhaps you're thinking of beta amyloid tangles, which are a different matter.
dmix 7y ago
Much like how they found the bushmeat apes as a source and with madcow prions, when a whole bunch of people are getting sick it's usually pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. The implications of food on longer term stuff like cancer will always be a hard thing to nail down but for serious diseases like this I don't think its currently a huge barrier.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  > pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. Without hundreds of millions of records, identifying "people who drank milk from Mr Smiths farm in 1969 were 200% more likely to get parkinsons 45 years later" couldn't be done. Yet if Mr Smiths farm had cows with some as-yet unidentified prion disease, this is the only way we'd find it.
  - kingkongjaffa 7y ago
    > It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. You think we have LESS data now than we did in the past? We have more than ever, and easier ways of collecting data than we have ever had.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      We have the data, but can't use it for research. As soon as you stick the data through an algorithm without getting permission from everyone in the dataset, you're getting put in prison for GDPR violations. Have fun getting consent from 100M people with only their postal address from 50 years ago.
      - matthewmacleod 7y ago
        Please don't make up nonsense about the GDPR. There's enough of it flying around, particularly in this forum.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        Being the government means never having to say you’re sorry. (1) Public Health Exemption Legislation (2) Use the NSA/GCHQ to get the data, run the analysis and once you know the answer do parallel construction with a much smaller, legally available dataset.
      - acollins1331 7y ago
        Someone doesn't understand how healthcare research is done.
      - mlang23 7y ago
        You are exaggregating. The current reality demonstrates that 1) nobody goes to jail 2) the corporation ignoring privacy rights gets a fine 3) everyone moves on
- asveikau 7y ago
  I think the long incubation times of some of these is a counterexample. Someone eats a monkey in rural Cameroon or Congo, and 10 years later they and their sexual partners have their immune system collapse. Will they know the connection? Some sources say that happened circa 1910. It wasn't identified until the 80s. In the meantime there were some bunk theories tied to homosexuality, drug use, or poverty as the root cause. I have heard that prion diseases can have even longer periods before they surface after exposure.
  - dmix 7y ago
    > It wasn't identified until the 80s. We didn't identify any retroviruses until the late 70s, we didn't know to look for them. That's different. The first peer reviewed paper on human retroviruses wasn't until 1984. https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4690-6-40 https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/174...
    - asveikau 7y ago
      They gave it a name, AIDS, in 1982. In my read of your comment, the claim is they should have, through statistics, been able to draw it back to the food source contamination that is now believed to have been a problem about 70 years prior. In other words, it can take a long time to notice the correlation. I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that there could be other such correlations, present and future, that have not been discovered or will take some time to discover.

djsumdog 7y ago

Do prions actually lead to Alzheimer's? I've read a lot of conflicting articles on that lately.

austinjp 7y ago
Prions do lead to certain degenerative brain diseases. Alzheimer's is caused by different factors, though. Perhaps you're thinking of beta amyloid tangles, which are a different matter.

dmix 7y ago

Much like how they found the bushmeat apes as a source and with madcow prions, when a whole bunch of people are getting sick it's usually pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. The implications of food on longer term stuff like cancer will always be a hard thing to nail down but for serious diseases like this I don't think its currently a huge barrier.

londons_explore 7y ago
> pretty easy to use statistics to determine a common food or infection source. It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. Without hundreds of millions of records, identifying "people who drank milk from Mr Smiths farm in 1969 were 200% more likely to get parkinsons 45 years later" couldn't be done. Yet if Mr Smiths farm had cows with some as-yet unidentified prion disease, this is the only way we'd find it.
- kingkongjaffa 7y ago
  > It's getting harder. Privacy protections mean this type of analysis across hundreds of millions of records isn't really possible anymore. You think we have LESS data now than we did in the past? We have more than ever, and easier ways of collecting data than we have ever had.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    We have the data, but can't use it for research. As soon as you stick the data through an algorithm without getting permission from everyone in the dataset, you're getting put in prison for GDPR violations. Have fun getting consent from 100M people with only their postal address from 50 years ago.
    - matthewmacleod 7y ago
      Please don't make up nonsense about the GDPR. There's enough of it flying around, particularly in this forum.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Being the government means never having to say you’re sorry. (1) Public Health Exemption Legislation (2) Use the NSA/GCHQ to get the data, run the analysis and once you know the answer do parallel construction with a much smaller, legally available dataset.
    - acollins1331 7y ago
      Someone doesn't understand how healthcare research is done.
    - mlang23 7y ago
      You are exaggregating. The current reality demonstrates that 1) nobody goes to jail 2) the corporation ignoring privacy rights gets a fine 3) everyone moves on
asveikau 7y ago
I think the long incubation times of some of these is a counterexample. Someone eats a monkey in rural Cameroon or Congo, and 10 years later they and their sexual partners have their immune system collapse. Will they know the connection? Some sources say that happened circa 1910. It wasn't identified until the 80s. In the meantime there were some bunk theories tied to homosexuality, drug use, or poverty as the root cause. I have heard that prion diseases can have even longer periods before they surface after exposure.
- dmix 7y ago
  > It wasn't identified until the 80s. We didn't identify any retroviruses until the late 70s, we didn't know to look for them. That's different. The first peer reviewed paper on human retroviruses wasn't until 1984. https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4690-6-40 https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/174...
  - asveikau 7y ago
    They gave it a name, AIDS, in 1982. In my read of your comment, the claim is they should have, through statistics, been able to draw it back to the food source contamination that is now believed to have been a problem about 70 years prior. In other words, it can take a long time to notice the correlation. I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that there could be other such correlations, present and future, that have not been discovered or will take some time to discover.