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Prion diseases terrify me. Especially having been in the UK eating beef at the time of the BSE outbreaks in the 1990s. I wonder if there have been studies on t
by sirsinsalot 5y ago
Prion diseases terrify me. Especially having been in the UK eating beef at the time of the BSE outbreaks in the 1990s.
I wonder if there have been studies on the scale of potential latent vCJD/Prion disease in the population?
- stormdennis 5y agoMany countries would not allow people who lived in the UK during the 80s and 90s to give blood. I ate so many burgers back then too. Our kids after they were born weren't allowed beef for years.
- stuff4ben 5y agoYep I'm one of them. Lived in the UK in the early 80's as a child. Gave blood for the first time when I was in college in the 90's to the Red Cross here in the US, and they mailed me back saying to never give blood again but didn't specify a reason. It wasn't until a few years later that I found out why. And the fact I might have a prion disease lurking in my blood sometimes terrifies me.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoIs there a blood test for that?
- stormdennis 5y agoI don't think it's a concern any more. The trajectory of cases that should have occurred if CJD was widespread in the community, never happened. One consequence of this is the blood donation ban has been lifted in most countries, I think.
- StavrosK 5y agoDid prions survive cooking? I'd have thought cooking the beef would have killed them.
- colechristensen 5y agoIf you took affected neural tissue and burned it to ash on a wood fire, there remains (although low) infective potential but probably only if you were trying in a lab. It takes 1000 C incineration to defeat infectivity and even then they’re still detectable. Composting so the proteins are broken down biologically is also an alternative. No amount of cooking prions that leave anything you want to eat makes infected material safe.
- giantg2 5y agoAgree that cooking is not an option. You can actually get that 1000C down to 600C if you also soak the tissue in acid prior to burning.
- FredPret 5y agoThat pretty much describes how I cook my steaks, a nice H2SO4 marinade followed by ten minutes in a bonfire
- shoemakersteve 5y agoAs long as you don't put ketchup on it.
- robbiep 5y agoI’m not so sure about the composting - the breakdown of organic material (well, protein in this case) in soils is largely brought about by proteases and proteases are largely ineffective
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI thought 200C for an hour was enough.
- Hypergraphe 5y agoYep, been there in the 90s, scary shit.
- gadders 5y agoI lived through it. I mean, it was scary, but the risks were low. I remember my landlord and his girlfriend at the time saying they were going to give up beef due to the risks. They said this whilst smoking cigarettes.
- eloff 5y agoPeople are so good at ignoring large daily risks and freaking out about tiny unknown risks. Just look how many people are scared of the covid19 vaccines, but take bigger risks in their morning commute. Actually if you just stick to the AstraZenica vaccine with the risk of blood clots - you take a bigger risk just getting out of bed in the morning, even if you never leave the house.
- dnautics 5y agoYes 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 commute is more dangerous. By contrast, the morning commute causing an unknown side effect in two years is highly unlikely. (For the record I'm vaccinated)
- eloff 5y agoThe 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.
- dnautics 5y ago> 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.
- tauntz 5y agoPrions terrify me as well because it seems like there's no stopping them.. > In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment
- medstrom 5y ago>It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment I really need to grow my own food.
- xeromal 5y agoMake sure to keep the deer out!
- Xcelerate 5y agoI had read this before. It's horrifying. How do you stop the chain reaction of proteins folding into lower energy states? It's not like a bacteria or virus; it's more like ice-nine, except instead of water it's your brain.
- codingbeer 5y agoWhenever a topic about something that could potentially destroy humanity comes up (say, climate issues), there is always some comment that makes a reasonable argument of why things are not as bad as they seem. This never happens when prions are the topic.
- medstrom 5y agoYou jinxed it, so I'll be the "some comment": prions won't spread everywhere all at once, so humanity will probably self-isolate in at least a few prion-free clusters.
- piker 5y agoActually there is a positive anecdote often cited. The Fore people of New Guinea engaged in ritual cannibalism which lead to the propagation of prions across generations. When they stopped, the generations of disease also stopped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
- joshuaissac 5y agoThe Fora people even developed a prion that confers resistance to kuru: > researchers [...] discovered a naturally occurring variant of a prion protein in a population from Papua New Guinea that confers strong resistance to kuru > This community [...] has developed their own biologically unique response [...] this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades
- giantg2 5y agoActually, there is some good news. Many types of prions diseases do not spread from animals to humans (so far). There have been some studies around this with CWD, but also Scapie has been around for hundreds or even thousands of years and never made the jump. Even in areas with CWD, we see that herd numbers do typically rebound. It's believed that there is some genetic factor that prevents the onset of the symptoms, like the body's proteins are less likely to fold in that way, so you only accumulate what you eat, or that the body can clean up the misfolded proteins. So it's not like it would wipe out everyone. I think I remember reading that some people are also researching prion treatments with some limited sucess. I would imagine they would come up with something even more quickly if there was a epidemic type of situation, similar to how medical researchers around the world focused on covid.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jeswin 5y agoI lost someone very close to me to sporadic CJD. This was some time back, but the episode is one of the most troubling moments in my life because of the suffering it inflicts on the patient - the hallucinations with no way to communicate or to stop it.
- jeffkeen 5y agoI lost my mom this way in 2016 and nothing has made me wish for legal euthanasia more than witnessing that suffering and decline.
- hyko 5y agoThere is ongoing surveillance from the National CJD Research & Surveillance Unit: https://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/figs.pdf https://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/figs.pdf
- one2three4 5y agoI skimmed through it but my understanding is that this is not a prion outbreak. At least the relevant tests come back negative. Did I get it wrong?
- NoGravitas 5y agoIt's not a known prion, like CJD. It could still possibly be an unknown prion. Or any number of other things.
- thehappypm 5y agoPrions cannot evolve, which is why they represent such a tiny space in diseases. They're really more a quirk of chemistry than biology.
- throwaway316943 5y agoThey can’t evolve independently but biological systems that produce proteins can evolve new proteins and new ways of manipulating proteins. A nightmare scenario would be a bacterial or viral mutation that produced a deadly prion.
- robbiep 5y agoA nightmare scenario for me is the creation of mRNA coding for a misfolded PRNP being weaponised.
- thehappypm 5y agoI don't think you need to worry too much about that, honestly. as far as bioweapons go mRNA is pretty involved.. if you need to inject your victim, that's already way too complicated. bioweapons are much more oriented towards tainting water supplies or air.
- robbiep 5y agoI know a huge amount about the level of technical skill required to do something with mRNA. It’s involved today. But in many ways it’s less technically involved than (re)creating the horse pox vaccine from scratch. And in 20 years it could be as simple as something aerosolised (there are already research projects for nasal mRNA vaccines) we don’t know quite yet where this will all lead to - PRNP is small enough at 200-odd amino acids long that it can be easily encoded on mRNA and as a fucked up disease vector that’s surely worse than anything viral - a timebomb sitting in everyone’s bloodstreams waiting 5-50 years to go off
- eganp 5y agoThis probably isn't possible as the folding of PrP is not encoded in the mRNA of PRNP. The fold of PrP is a post-translational phenomenon, much like its glycosylation. This is true for many mammalian proteins, especially cell-surface proteins.
- arisAlexis 5y agoWhat happens if for example nestle has a contaminated factory product that millions eat and we will know it in 10 years from now?
- phobosanomaly 5y agoApparently the only options for diagnostic testing are brain biopsy and pulling CSF samples, both of which are probably a non-starter for screening purposes across a population. Clinical Laboratory Tests Used To Aid in Diagnosis of Human Prion Disease Allyson Connor, Han Wang, Brian S. Appleby, Daniel D. Rhoads Journal of Clinical Microbiology Sep 2019, 57 (10) e00769-19; DOI: 10.1128/JCM.00769-19 https://jcm.asm.org/content/57/10/e00769-19 https://jcm.asm.org/content/57/10/e00769-19