The most terrifying thing about prions is that they are infectious but not alive: they can't be "killed" in the normal sense by sterilization. The proteins must literally be dissolved to neutralize them.
Another example of distributed costs, concentrated benefits really screwing us over in the long-run.
The point being, that we may not be able to measure risk at this time, because the prions may be latent in people. (Cue spooky music.)
I was raised to do it, but I am now barred due to the note on the eligibility sheets. I talked to a Red Cross area administrator about it and he said that, even though it has been over 20 years, they are unlikely to lift the ban until effective testing and treatments are found. Since there are no tests, they can't risk the blood supply.
[1] Check the details of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Variant (vCJD); "Mad Cow Disease" option: http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requ...
• Use vaccination to train the host's immune system deal with it, should it ever encounter the full version.
• Use special drugs to slow down their replication to let the host's immune system deal with the rest.
Prions have no special, prion-only replication strategy we can target, and I'm not sure whether the immune system can be trained to attack only prions and not their regular protein equivalents.
A prion tends to be vastly different than the original protein. I thought the bigger problem was that prions are the metaphorical tanks of the protein world. Just look at what it takes to denature a prion compared to other proteins.
The most terrifying thing about prions is that they are infectious but not life: they can't be "killed" in the normal sense
While viruses are generally not considered to be alive, they are considered to be instances of life, aren't they?
Everyone has their own definition though. I remember reading a novel where life was defined simply as heredity, mutation, and adaptation. The second definition makes more sense to me, and implicitly includes viruses.
The good news is that some people are "immune" to developing an infectious prion disease. Turns out that certain mutations prevent normal proteins from interacting with a complementary prion in a way that would cause them to become misfolded.
Learning other languages or instruments is probably useful from a brain health standpoint regardless of your genetics (even if you already have early-stage AD you can slow progression), but they are just proxies for activity. I would guess that learning something that interests you is more important than what that thing actually is.
Keep in mind I'm no expert, but this seems to be a reasonable assumption.
http://www.doctortipster.com/11968-new-vaccine-against-metha...
http://www.livescience.com/21132-cocaine-vaccine-cure-addict...
http://www.voanews.com/content/scientists-develop-experiment...
This method may be a little bit costly (relative to promised returns of solving a problem that does not directly affect humans) and with limited effect, but still, it may be a way worth investigating.
Dry heat will inactivate prions, but you need 200C for 4 hours or more which is more than most plastics can handle.
Edit: Actually, Carl Sagan wrote his memes in metal (and shot them into the universe) so I take that back.
Prions are a single component. They are proteins with the same amino acid sequence as a protein normally produced by an organism. Except they have been misfolded. The geometry of the misfolded protein is such that it becomes a catalyst to reproduce the same misfolding error. There are no "brains" in them. They can arise entirely accidentally. They're a bit like the ice-nine from Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_, in which a crystal of a novel form of solid water that melts at a higher temperature can recruit liquid water to grow the crystal without limit. Each individual prion can misfold any number of same-sequenced amino acid chains.
And like the ice-nine, which melted at a temperature above human body temperature, the prion may be able to survive through more extreme conditions than other forms of the protein.
In the best case scenario, the prion does little more than cause a deficiency of the normally-folded protein forms in the body. In the worst-case scenario, it poisons some other process within the body in its misfolded form.
They force other crystals to be of the same size and shape.
(That's why creamed honey producers put a "starter" crystal in, which is tiny, that forces the honey to produce other tiny crystals.)
Pet peeve of mine, but it looks like you slept through English class as well. The plural of "virus" in English is "viruses". "virus" in latin is a mass word and has no plural, like "sugar" and "air".
Anyway, this is hackernews.
For those of us who grew up in internet hacking communities of the early 90's "virii" was the plural form in the lingua franca. As a descriptivist of great habit, I will continue to use that form.
How about this argument then: "virii" is f*ckin ugly? No? Darn. :-)
Just because a noun is a mass word in one language, it doesn't mean it has to be in other languages that have borrowed the word.
For example, in my language, "lego" is a mass word, and to make a plural you would have to say something like "pieces of lego", but in English, the plural of "lego" is "legos".
[There's a "species" that spread around the Andes and eventually reached itself on the other side---and could no longer breeed with "itself". Genes could still in theory travel all the way around and back to the discontinuous point, however.]
edit: http://i.stack.imgur.com/4VsFW.png will make this less confusing, and quite unintentionally :).
An object is considered to be alive if it consumes energy to create or maintain its own order (in opposition to the general effect of the second law of thermodynamics in the wider system in which it finds itself).
Although this doesn't exclude crystals..! :/