Counterpoint: 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.
Prions are pretty scary, but I think there are a lot of things this article gets wrong.<p>- Prions are resistant to sterilization (since there is nothing to "kill"), but simple soap and water are still highly effective<p>- 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.<p>- While vegans might have some risk, meat multiplies the risk because of how it can concentrate prions. I have to imagine that vegans have an incredibly low risk profile for prions.<p>- 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.<p>If you were an anarchist rooting for the collapse of society, as this writer seems to pitching for, sure it seems like it might be a more likely vector than many.
So one of the oldest known prion diseases is a disease of sheep called scrapie. It is not transmissible to humans, thankfully.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie</a>
<i>prion infections are always eventually fatal, there is no cure, and they are contagious.</i><p>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.<p>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 were not issued proper PPE and ended up with a wide variety of symptoms.<p><a href="https://www.twincities.com/2008/02/06/minn-to-question-25-more-in-meatpacking-illness-probe/" rel="nofollow">https://www.twincities.com/2008/02/06/minn-to-question-25-mo...</a>
I remember that in the 90s, when "mad cow disease" was dominating the headlines, it was predicted that there would be an exponential increase in cases, decades down the line. The same point about prions being virtually indestructible was being made, the same concerns about surgical equipment and blood donations were raised.<p>Suffice it to say, the prion disaster did not materialize, so I'm skeptical about the same story being repeated almost verbatim today. My guess is that prions aren't all that contagious after all, especially after basic food preparation measures.
> Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about, viruses are the perfect vector for the horrors peddled by the BBC, New York Times, and their ilk.<p>Proceeds to peddle the "horrors" of prions.
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.
I for one would appreciate anyone who has expert biological knowledge commenting on this.<p>I don't entirely dismiss this article since I have a friend who worked with prions in a bio lab at the Univ. of Chicago and I remember he was absolutely terrified of them. (And IIRC he reported having some doubts about laboratory safety protocols...) But I don't think he was afraid of this kind of apocalyptic endgame either; he just thought they were horrendously nasty stuff.
>The anti-globalist movement of the 90s is long dead. The far-left which fueled it has been co-opted, down to the level of its language and internalized identities, by global business interests. Coordinators of anarchist riots appear in Forbes; there are anarchist professors and journalists.<p>No citations<p>Lots of fear<p>Thinly veiled far right rhetoric
I understand the argument here, and how ill-prepared we are for steady low-coefficient exponentials, but never more have I felt like the 2nd law of thermodynamics is my friend.<p>Even if 1 prion can kill you, even if prions will survive in the soil indefinitely, I think we are going to erode all the topsoil faster than the prions can accumulate in concentrations sufficient to cause issues.
As I read this, cellular automata lurked in the back of my mind. Despite the stochastic details, there is an eerie clockwork marching hiding under the covers of life.
Prions used to bug me as an idea for quite a while when I was an undergrad. However, since I have worked in a biolab and I actually read material that isn't just fear mongering, I can tell you a ton of stuff that makes this article totally wrong.<p>Prions don't live forever, they are susceptible to soap and water. Prions are proteins, anything that can break down a protein will work to break down a prion. They are not some form of mystical protein. They will break down naturally over time. This is why regions that have had Kuru outbreaks have been able to stop those outbreaks.<p>Since prions are literally just a chemical (albeit a complex one), they are not trying to propagate themselves. There have been outbreaks, but no massive ones with prions because that's simply not how they work. As well, since they are proteins and proteins eventually break down when they are removed from a living being, they will also eventually break down.<p>This article is a whole lotta fear with not a whole lotta valid info.
The article is completely wrong about the prion mechanism.<p>>The prion’s structure is corruptive because it is not a copy but a mirror image of the protein, flipped in the opposite direction. In technical terms, some groups of prions have the opposite chirality—Greek for “handedness”—of their normal cousin proteins. The prion is doubly corruptive because it does not keep its inversion to itself: when it encounters its mirror image—a normal protein—it convinces that image to flip, to change chiralities and join the prion group.<p>The amino acids don't change their chirality, only the protein's secondary structure.
So, is it because prions managed to attain a lower energy configuration than similar proteins, forcing them to reconfigure themselves upon contact with a prion, causing a cascade of protein deformation that is super stable and can't be reversed? Like protein configuration = local minimum, prion configuration = global minimum?
Prions 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?
Asking naively: is anybody doing research on good prions: proteins that get other proteins to fold correctly/helpfully, beating out bad prions in the process?
If the issue is a protein folding the wrong way, and inducing that fold into nearby proteins, why doesn't this just happen spontaneously in humans?
I came across an article about vaccination against ingested prions a while back.<p>I couldn't find the exact one that I read a year ago... the one I read talked about a test where the vaccinated mice survived while the unvaccinated mice died quickly.<p>Prion diseases are scary psychologically because the early stages are almost the same as any other neurodegenerative disease. For those who are suffering from one, who would likely develop some sort of depression early on, really gives them doubts about their lifespan. This is from personal experience.<p>Here's a bunch of articles about it:<p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18215090/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18215090/</a><p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17234125/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17234125/</a><p><a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/nlmc-fsv121714.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/nlmc-fsv1217...</a>
I wouldn't be too worried about this. I'm noticing chatter in the worst parts of the internet around COVID vaccines causing prion disease, it's likely just the latest disinfo by Q types.<p>This site hosts white-supremacist aligned articles (like this one supporting the dehumanizing NPC meme: <a href="https://www.countere.com/home/how-to-spot-an-npc" rel="nofollow">https://www.countere.com/home/how-to-spot-an-npc</a>) so I wouldn't be too worried about an article here about the "end of the world"
I wonder if there might not be something similar to the Prion mechanism that cause the healthy brain protein to “change chiralities” and join the prion group on the atomic level that might give insight into the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.