Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
bbc.com
bbc.com
But the agency ruled that the BSE test was licensed only for "surveillance" of animal health, and rejected Creekstone's request because it implied "a consumer safety aspect" that was "not scientifically warranted."
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/uoia-ftf0515...
> NOT A FOOD SAFETY TEST
> BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to see if the infectious agent is present. We know that the earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2-to-3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms. The time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Since most cattle that go to slaughter in the United States are both young and clinically normal, testing all slaughter cattle for BSE might offer misleading assurances of safety to the public.
> ...
> Why doesn't USDA test every animal at slaughter?
> There is currently no test to detect the disease in a live animal. BSE is confirmed by taking samples from the brain of an animal and testing to see if the infectious agent - the abnormal form of the prion protein - is present. The earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2 to 3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms, and the time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Therefore, there is a long period of time during which current tests would not be able to detect the disease in an infected animal.
> Since most cattle are slaughtered in the United States at a young age, they are in that period where tests would not be able to detect the disease if present. Testing all slaughter cattle for BSE could produce an exceedingly high rate of false negative test results and offer misleading assurances of the presence or absence of disease.
> Simply put, the most effective way to detect BSE is not to test all animals, which could lead to false security, but to test those animals most likely to have the disease, which is the basis of USDA's current program.
https://www.usda.gov/topics/animals/bse-surveillance-informa...
Mass testing, even testing that's mostly at a stage unlikely to detect anything, and only occasionally on less-typical older animals, will provide new useful info. Waiting to test until an a old symptomatic cow "most likely to have the disease" shows up is closing the barn door after the mad cows have already escaped.
The USDA's logic is dangerous like the bureaucratic rationing of COVID tests, early on. At crucial times in early 2020, no matter how suspicious a case/death, and how well it fit COVID symptoms, if the patient hadn't returned from Wuhan in the last few weeks, a test was prohibited. That's a "we don't want to know" policy.
What useful information does it provide? Is there any evidence that testing can detect BSE before symptoms appear? Japan had tested clinically healthy cows until 2017, when they decided to limit testing to symptomatic cows.[0]
> Waiting to test until an a old symptomatic cow "most likely to have the disease" shows up is closing the barn door after the mad cows have already escaped.
Obviously it would be ideal to detect BSE in cows that are younger and not yet symptomatic. But if there's no evidence that this can be done, testing provides a false assurance of safety. Testing older, symptomatic cows will at least give an estimate as to the prevalence of BSE and an indication as to whether safety measures are working.
It's much ado about nothing, anyway, since the US has only ever had four cases of vJCD from BSE, and in each case the individual had spent large amounts of time in countries known for having tainted beef. Perhaps dementia cases are misdiagnosed, but if there were a large danger of BSE/vCJD, one would expect to see those symptoms in a great deal of younger people.
[0]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/japan-japan-lift-age-based-bse...
The potential for surprise & early detection.
As your quote noted, most cows are slaughtered earlier, so generations could be infected without any detection. If you only test 5yo symptomatic cows, you can never find an outbreak until it's too late, or anything that contradicts the breezy reassurances of the industry-captured USDA.
Again, it's like when the CDC & Fauci were assuring people that there was no significant community COVID spread, when they were also blocking any testing that could detect such spread, by limiting tests only to those that fit their preconceived notion ("only recent returnees from Wuhan").
How much, if any, random surveillance of older asymptomatic cows happens that gives you such confidence in the current testing?
How many meat cows live long enough to get a good read on the symptomatic rate?
Are you sure early mild symptoms of ill health might not just get a cow culled before enough symptoms-to-test arrive, by ranchers who, like the USDA, "would rather not know"?
Your last paragraph seems to reduce to, "we'll know if there's a lot of it, if and when there are a lot of young people with suspicious BSE".
We should aspire to use something other than our young people for early detection. Or at least not block those who want to try it.
They couldn't be detected by those tests anyway if they don't have symptoms, or at least not until shortly before symptoms become apparent.
> Again, it's like when the CDC & Fauci were assuring people that there was no significant community COVID spread when they were also blocking any testing that could detect such spread, by limiting tests only to those that fit their preconceived notion ("only recent returnees from Wuhan").
There are a number of differences here. Most importantly COVID tests can detect if you have COVID even when asymptomatic, but BSE tests cannot detect BSE before it is symptomatic.
> How much, if any, random surveillance of older asymptomatic cows happens that gives you such confidence in the current testing? How many meat cows live long enough to get a good read? Are you sure mild symptoms of ill health might not just get them culled before enough symptoms-to-test by ranchers who, like the USDA, "would rather not know"?
> Your last paragraph seems to reduce to, "we'll only know if there's a lot of it if and when there are a lot of young people with BSE".
First, the testing is of symptomatic cows, not asymptomatic cows, and it is deliberately not a random sample, but a sample of the population that is most likely to have it.
Second, my point is that the lack of any cases of young people with vCJD in the US, let alone widespread cases, indicates that it simply isn't the case that we have some phantom population of cows with BSE that are being let through by the USDA.
> Or at least not block those who want to try it.
I agree the USDA shouldn't block it. However, it isn't unreasonable to prohibit marketing based on the use of such tests if they give an unwarranted impression of safety; allowing that would be misleading advertising. When Creekstone applied to do testing, it was precisely for this reason that they applied, and for this reason they were denied.
Your topmost comment mentioned tests can detect BSE "2-3 months before" symptoms. That'd catch more than waiting for symptoms - especially if done broadly! Waiting for symptoms, when the window-of-detection is so small & so late-in-life, & most cows slaughtered young, seems designed for entities that "would rather not know".
> Most importantly COVID tests can detect if you have COVID even when asymptomatic, but BSE tests cannot detect BSE before it is symptomatic.
This contradicts the explicit 2-3 months before symptoms claim you made previously. Also, being less restrictive about testing could create the necessary market for more sensitive tests. If a cow can have it its full life, but it only reaches detectable levels after years, maybe tests can eventually detect the early presence.
> First, the testing is of symptomatic cows, not asymptomatic cows, and it is deliberately not a random sample, but a sample of the population that is most likely to have it.
Exactly! There's zero testing where it wouldn't already be suspected. So no chance to discover a problem early, or challenge the assumptions limiting testing.
> Second, my point is that the lack of any cases of young people with vCJD in the US, let alone widespread cases, indicates that it simply isn't the case that we have some phantom population of cows with BSE that are being let through by the USDA.
Indeed, but the correlate of that is that the regime you're advocating can thus only detect a problem after a bunch of atypical, or weven "widespread", cases are noticed. That's the signal you're waiting for, before testing more.
That approach sucked for COVID, it'll suck for BSE.
I really try to stay away from politics, but sounds as something made by some bribed political appointment.
I'm not an expert on testing for prions, but it doesn't surprise me that the test isn't good enough to pronounce an animal disease-free. And if that's correct, it's very much their purview to make it clear that advertising it as disease-free would be false.
Most of the work at US agencies is done by career employees who are largely insulated from changes at the top. Politics certainly happens, but rarely at the level of individual decisions like this.
Such agencies certainly aren't immune to regulatory capture, and it's conceivable that it's the case here. The scientists and bureaucrats who wrote that have likely worked with the cattle industry their whole careers, and have many personal contacts. Same for their bosses.
But this memo turns on a specific technical point. If the tests aren't good enough, then they're not good enough. It wouldn't take regulatory capture for them to reach that conclusion, and this memo is exactly how they'd say it. It's also what it could sound like if they were being influenced by industry, but I'd say that the burden of proof is on somebody making that claim.
If 3,4 million new cars are sold in USA then probably 99% are generally ok. Because in current world generally most things are ok by default (custom software might be different, but off the shelf software generally works).
But if you would be unlucky 1% where nobody checked the breaks... this would be 34 yhousand cars.
And there is much more cattle raised and consumed so checking everything makes sense.
Not checking anything because 99% will be ok is a pseudoscientific argument.
This isn't what the argument against testing every cow is about. It is really 'You can't test every car's brakes with a test that will say the car's brakes are OK even if those brakes are bad'. If a food product had a toxic ingredient, do you think it's appropriate for a company to run a test that can detect it, say, 50% of the time, and say their product is xyz-toxin-free? What if the test is only effective 10% of the time? 1%?
The USDA didn't decide not to perform no tests for BSE tests at all. They decided to perform tests specifically for those cases where, if the cow had BSE, the test could actually catch it. Again, I don't entirely agree with the USDA's approach, but it isn't unreasonable.
I read this as "you can test your animals if you want to, but you can't then use the results to make any claim or statement about them". I suspect they're free to test their animals, but not free to stamp "100% tested BSE-free beef!" on their steaks. I suspect this is what's meant by "surveillance". If that's the case, I agree with the gov't; private testing shouldn't be used to make claims. But it could be used for internal product safety, and if anything comes back positive, the USDA could be brought in to verify and take action.
It's not entirely clear to me from the article.
Of course, this raises the question of how CWD is being transmitted in elk, since elk don’t eat elk.
“Scientists believe CWD proteins (prions) likely spread between animals through body fluids like feces, saliva, blood, or urine, either through direct contact or indirectly through environmental contamination of soil, food or water.”
https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/transmission.html
Milk is clearly a body fluid, though is curiously absent from the above statement.
And as other comments about the difficulty of sterilizing prions make clear, pasteurization will have no effect.
That's why so many drugs are snorted. It works faster than just about anything else other than direct intravenous injection.
Knowing what we know about the practices of most US beef farms and the countless USDA failures in both detection and enforcement of rules/regulations meant to protect the consumer, I think it's the wise path to take for everyone living here.
A. BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to see if the infectious agent is present. We know that the earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2-to-3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms. The time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Since most cattle that go to slaughter in the United States are both young and clinically normal, testing all slaughter cattle for BSE might offer misleading assurances of safety to the public.
The BSE surveillance program is not for the purposes of determining food safety. Rather, it is an animal health surveillance program. USDA's BSE surveillance program allows USDA to detect the disease if it exists at very low levels in the U.S. cattle population and provides assurances to consumers and our international trading partners that the interlocking system of safeguards in place to prevent BSE are working.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736662/ [1] https://www.cureffi.org/2013/05/05/prion-protein-n-linked-gl... [2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.431014v2
It's understandable why one might infer from the correlation that there's a relationship but this is confounded by observation. The baseline expectation for CJD in a population is 1-2 cases/million [0]. vCJD cases in the UK never exceeded 30/yr [1, Fig 2. a]. Yes, vCJD occurs primarily in younger people - but that's circular as vCJD is defined as CJD-like disease with early onset. If cross-species transmission were common, one would expect a similar spike in age >40.
The incidence of vCJD, even at its peak, was exceedingly rare. Many things, such as observation bias, pollution, or rare side-effects from faddish street drugs could be at fault here. It's tempting to jump to conclusions, a la "eating fats makes you fat," but it's totally unwarranted in the face of the in vitro and in vivo data demonstrating strong species barriers.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd/occurrence-transmission.html [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-020-02153-7
I don't think your sources support this conclusion. bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) rarely passes the species barrier, but it is difficult, if not impossible to estimate what the rate is in the absence of mitigations.
Last but not least, there are huge uncertainties around the diagnosis rate of mad cow in humans. For example, a 2013 study (1) found that 1 in 2000 people in the UK now have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Based on this, it could be possible that transmission rates are very high if a human were to eat mad cow nervous tissue.
Also, these antibodies are not very selective for a given confirmation. Idk how this made it into the BMJ because standard in the PrP field is a protease resistance assay given the issues with Ab specificity.
I am not an expert in the field, but it seems relevant to consider latent or asymptomatic PrP expression when assessing how often it crosses the species barrier.
Is there a better reason to prohibit voluntary testing than what is included in the article?
Thus the USDA is placing their reputation over the health of US citizens.
I find their argument far more persuasive than yours. Is there more to yours?
>It asked the USDA for permission to buy test kits from a California company that made the equipment in France. However, under the Virus-Serum-Toxin Act, the government can regulate the manufacturing and sale of “any virus, serum, toxin, or analogous product for use in the treatment of domestic animals.” The USDA deemed the “rapid BSE test” a “treatment” under the Act and banned Creekstone from buying test kits from Bio-Rad.
https://www.courthousenews.com/usda-can-block-testing-for-ma...
There are plenty of sources, including court documents, that verify that the USDA was trying to prevent private testing, not just claims being made on the basisnof private testing.
The ban on testing was justified by the USDA based on the potential for safety claims, but the ban itself was on testing.
I don't personally buy the argument, if the US testing was sufficient to guarantee safety I see no consumer harm in allowing additional (potentially ineffective) testing that could help a US producer satisfy other countries' import controls.
> Creekstone claims to have suffered $200,000 per day in lost revenue as a result of the diminished export market. Stewart Decl. ¶ 17. Moreover, in markets where U.S. beef is available, Creekstone contends that consumer fears about BSE have diminished its sales. See Id. ¶¶ 4, 5 (discussing market surveys in Japan and U.S.). To allay the concerns of consumers and importers, in 2004 Creekstone made a “business decision” to perform the rapid BSE test on each cow it slaughters. ... USDA memorialized its decision to deny Creekstone permission to purchase rapid BSE test kits from Bio-Rad in a June 1, 2004 letter, concluding that “allowing a company to use a BSE test in a private marketing program is inconsistent with USDA's mandate to ensure effective, scientifically sound testing for significant animal diseases and maintain domestic and international confidence in U.S. cattle and beef products.”
Anyway, at the time of the decision, Japan was allowing US exports of beef (this was argued by the USDA in the district court, which they did not pursue on appeal), so their effort was purely a marketing one. For the record, Japan would subsequently go on to ban American beef again, before allowing imports of American beef once more in 2019, after they themselves had scaled back their BSE testing in 2017 to only symptomatic cows.
Would the USDA have allowed Creekstone to use the test if they had said they were going to use it as part of an animal health monitoring measure, which is what the USDA's program is? Maybe, but obviously Creekstone wasn't using it for that purpose if they were wanting to test every cow, including cows for which the test could not possibly detect BSE even if they had it.
[0]: https://www.animallaw.info/case/creekstone-farms-premium-bee...
> Japan would subsequently go on to ban American beef again, before allowing imports of American beef once more in 2019,
1) The Japanese rules on beef exports did not change significantly between 2006 and 2019. The ban on old beef that was imposed in 2006 was not lifted until 2019. While an argument relating to this was brough up in the original case (that the USDA lost) but not in the appeals case (that the USDA won.)
2) Nothing in the decision in favor of the USDA that I saw was justified on the basis of the purposes of the testing. The decision came down that the judges readings of what authority the USDA has under US law.
So yes, the USDA has the authority to prevent testing and has used it in ways that directly harmed a US business and I don't see how they protected anyone in the process.
Just because our laws give the USDA that authority, doesn't mean that is a good thing.
My mind first went to this issue when I read the headline, though upon reading the article it's probably something else, as CWD isn't really a thing in that region [it's more of a Mountain state kind of thing thing]. And, of course, I'm not a prion expert, so I only vaguely know what I'm writing about.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutriti...
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736662/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5667731/
I wonder if there have been studies on the scale of potential latent vCJD/Prion disease in the population?
> 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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_IX
Also I only know of Ice-nine because of fun facts like this, didn't even know the name of the story let alone have read it.
Whether their ideas and worlds stand up to Asimov and company, or happen to be appealing to a particular reader, is another matter, but the command of writing itself is overall better, I'd say. I don't think a modern author would have much luck getting novels or stories in major magazines published with Asimov-tier dialog & characterization, for example.
Plus those eras were full of tons of garbage, in addition to what we remember. New Wave (60s and 70s) in particular tended to some very special interests that I don't think have held up too well, with some exceptions. A lot of that era's stories are very in love with sex & drugs and not in a way that really translates into a good tale. Most of those aren't exactly well-beloved these days.
On the flip side, there are definitely some modern sci-fi authors that are among the most famous but have some serious problems putting together an entirely good novel. I'll refrain from naming names but among them is maybe the only author whose book has ever made me mad at them for wasting such a good idea, setting, and opening, by just having no damn follow-through and getting super lazy in the last 1/3 or so. They're probably a top-5 sci fi name, among active authors today. But I stand by the overall quality level being notably higher on at least some dimensions, and it's even true for that guy.
But that's just the thing -- science fiction is about the ideas, and about the sociological and psychological impact of those ideas.
Whether a work has literary merit is neither here nor there for most people, and "science fiction" as a genre has been looked down upon by literary folks since it's inception. I don't know why anyone would be interested in praise from a community that is so invested in snobbery.
Regardless, science fiction authors of the time did have literary merit, if that's what you care about. LeGuin and Butler, are both regarded well in modern literary circles as far as I know. Vonnegut himself is regarded well also. At the time however, their books were condemned as being inadequate by the prevailing literary reviewers for various reasons unrelated to their actual writing.
Work from that time is perfectly functional and servicable for the most part, especially if you look at the places where the stories were submitted and published -- a small majority of Clarke's works ended up being published in Playboy, I don't think anyone can blame him for not creating a literary masterpiece when the majority of places that would actually pay him for his work were essentially pulp magazines.
I'm horrible at remembering names, but three of my favorites off the top of my head are Peter Watts, Neil Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robison.
I've generally had decent luck finding new authors by just by seeing who gets Hugo and Nebula nominations.
Asimov's SF is, sadly, hard to read these days. Clarke has held up better but still a bit dated. Lem reads as fresh as ever, but he's not so well known.
(What happened to Bradbury and Heinlein?)
Gene Wolfe is only one generation younger than these guys, and he just died, but I consider him a better writer than all the others I mentioned except Lem.
I remember reading that nothing but incineration would work in the context of Food-and-Mouth disease, but it seems modern techniques in brain surgery do use bleach. Interesting.
Essentially, the only thing that works is disintegrating the prions. You can't wash them off, since you're simply washing them into the water cycle. You can't deal with them in a way that preserves other biological matter, since they are proteins, disintegrating them means disintegrating any other proteins in that area.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak
It sounds a bit scary but it's not clear that it would change the risk profile.
Is it more irresponsible than not removing them prior to operating on someone's brain?
"This suggests wheat was unable to transport sufficient PrP(TSE) from the roots to the stem to be detectable by the methods employed."
I really need to grow my own food.
This never happens when prions are the topic.
There's no evidence that any significant human population has ever been wiped out by prions at any point in the history of the species. Heck, we haven't even observed widespread (>10% infected) prion disease in any species.
At least with something like climate change, there's the fact that post-industrial activity is doing something different than pre-industrial history. But this reasoning doesn't hold for prion cataclysm. It's more like asteroid apocalypse. Yes it could happen, but statistically it's not something we have to worry about on a civilizational timeframe.
I don't see any justification for why humanity in 2021 is courting prion disaster to a greater degree than it was in 2000 BC. Animal husbandry has existed for fifteen thousand years. Maybe globalization would spread a prion outbreak faster. But the point is we've never even observed localized prion collapse. If prions were that dangerous, there should already be regional areas that have transformed into total no-go zones.
Prion contamination can now be shipped around the world in about 24 hours, where it can enter new populations much more easily.
This is the part that worries me. If something happened like this even 300-400 years ago, it would probably just wipe out that village.
This is probably exactly what happened with CWD - deer overpopulation plus the random protein misfold created the conditions for a contagious disease where it didn't exist before.
We only noticed it on our farm animals because we brought the cycle time down as we fed downer cows to other cows as a source of protein
While the kinds of people who would fly planes into buildings, release nerve toxins in subway stations or club entire villages of outsiders to death have always existed the ability to research and manufacture prions did not exist in 2000BC.
That combination of desire to destroy the world and the legitimate ability to do it with rapidly more accessible biotechnology is a disconcerting reality that we need to account for when discussing theses things.
Imagine a religious extremists organization mass producing prions and placing them in key parts of food supply chain. We probably wouldn't have a clue until it was too late.
With that said I sort of disagree with you. Prions are particularly attractive to a hypothetical bioterrorist due to the difficulty in detecting them, their durability and also the delay on effects. As I said above, once you know you have a problem it will be too late.
Keep in mind these are just the prions that nature has produced. It is quite possible that humans are able to modify existing threatening prions or develop whole new classes of threatening prions that haven't developed in nature.
Overall I think the most effective strike from a bioterrorist won't come from a single attack vector but a well timed combination of vectors. We've seen how something as minor as COVID has taken all of our attention and resources, now imagine if a terrorist timed something like COVID with a follow up strike like prions.
Terrorism is about fear, and that comes with spectacular actions even if it kills relatively few people, not with stealthy poisoning of big population.
You're not gonna have anything remotely as impactful as 9/11 with prions, even if you killed a million people in the long run.
Is it a good weapon for a nation state going at war, or committing a genocide. Definitely yes! But it sucks for terrorism.
Well a prion disease (called Kuru) did affect the Fore people of New Guinea seriously in the 1950s and 1960s as I recall. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Fore people:
> Furthermore, Kuru predominantly affected women, as women more commonly partook in cannibalistic religious rituals. Because of this, there was a significant sex imbalance in Fore society.[14] By some accounts, this gender imbalance reached a 3:1 male to female ratio at its worst. This affected the family structure of the Fore, as it became commonplace for children to be raised and cared for only by their fathers.[1]
It was a scary sounding disease so I remembered it when years later it was discovered to be caused by prions and reported in The New York Times.
*Technology has given us things like nukes, so...could be harder to predict these days.
I'm not afraid of being hit by some asteroid hanging there, but if one day we spotted an asteroid whose trajectory was straight to earth, then being terrified would be quite legitimate.
Because the 'scientific' community need to keep their jobs. You know they too have mortgages to pay...
So... point being there is endless stream of fear mongering (some of which ends up being true) to justify their existence.
> 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
They are a really scary thing, but it's a meteor strike style of scary, nobody really expects it to happen before we can deal with it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
How the hell can you say anything with confidence about an "unknown risk"? It's unknown.
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
I’m not sure what you mean by the fold being post translational, all folding is post translational, it’s literally the protein curling up into the lowest energy conformation as soon as it encounters the cellular environment, with assistance from HSPs if necessary. Unless you meant something else?
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.
You can actually get that 1000C down to 600C if you also soak the tissue in acid prior to burning.
To quote from Wikipedia:
`Prion aggregates are stable, and this structural stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents: they cannot be destroyed by ordinary disinfection or cooking.`
But it's nasty stuff to work with, since it also happily does tons of damage to the proteins making up the humans applying it.
Which makes sense I guess but it's also scary.
Until we have better, cheaper, and less error prone methods of remediating prion diseases they're the #1 fear on my biological apocalypse list.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...
> 134 °C (273 °F) for 18 minutes in a pressurized steam autoclave has been found to be somewhat effective in deactivating the agent of disease
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surgical-exposure...
Also, do you have a link for the distribution? My understanding is that it is spread over a large geographic area, but that it's found in smaller clumps.
Yes, BSE is also worrying, but beef that you buy at supermarkets is also checked more thoroughly compared to game meat. I'd worry more about restaurants and their suppliers.
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
[1] http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/journal/issue/journal_41_1/stone.pdf
So a CJD test is usually staining a biopsy with congo red and observing apple-green birefringence in the image. This generally works to detect amyloid plaques, which is common to all prions. So unless there was a lab mistake, the prion is localized elsewhere from where the biopsies are being done (FFI, for example, localizes to a different part of the brain) or they were using some other procedure, it's seems pretty unlikely this is a prion disease.
[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-5338-3_...
This reminds me that I first read about early cases of covid around october or november 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/asia/plague-china-p...
Date: November 13 2019
>Li Jifeng, a doctor at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital where the two people sought treatment, wrote on WeChat, a social media platform, that the patients sought treatment on Nov. 3
>“After so many years of specialist training, I’m familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of most respiratory diseases,” wrote Dr. Li. “But this time, I looked and looked at it. I couldn’t guess what pathogen caused this pneumonia. I only knew it was rare.”
Given that, having a case in Beijing in November 2019 is entirely plausible
What I was alluding to with "precursor" was that it may have been the same virus, but that some mutation in Wuhan might have made it so much easier to spread. My mind just has trouble imagining a model where a virus can lie pretty much dormant for half a year in different populations, and then surge in one place only and spread from there. That may well be a limitation of my mind, I simply don't see how that would work.
What I mean by this is that viruses may have arbitrary behaviour when the infected population is small. Let's say as of September 2019, five people in the world were infected with COVID. It's actually not improbable or crazy that the epidemic outbreak only started in Dec/Jan.
I guess you can google news by year. I'm very certain those articles exist. Next time I heard about it, it was getting much worse.
Around mid-February I saw in the news that there was a somewhat big cluster in Italy and realized that everyone was screwed :-(
I hate it when she's right.
This URL searches Google for your phrase "suspicious cases of pneumonia in china" filtered for results between Oct 1 and Nov 30 2019
It is of course possible I missed a story but before January 3rd there was little to no mainstream news coverage. It is quite frustrating to find accurate articles now as many sites are falsely returned in date range Google searches. All "mystery flu-like pneumonia" stories I've found reported in December 2019 are medical news so it is extremely unlikely someone would come across such an article as part of normal news reading.
Especially for my 8 year old son. He is old enough to understand things are not normal but young enough to not fully understand the gravity of the situation or have memories of much outside of his little bubble.
Apart from that I remember the first reports from China in December 2019.
https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/
I too remember talking about it on Christmas.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-rare-diseases-...
But perhaps these are all symptoms of diseases and combinations of diseases varying, rather than the people?
The reason is the outbreak there of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka "mad cow disease") and the human variant mentioned in the article, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) which may lie dormant for decades IIRC.
This makes me think of fire policy. Although prions are resistant to temperatures of 200C or so, wildfires often reach much higher temperatures. It would seem, again naively, that a regular regime of fire (e.g. controlled burns) might curtail any such accumulation (as well as have benefits to fire-adapted and fire-dependent plant species). I'm not sure if controlled burns are ever allowed to get that hot though.
Is it possible that this is the cause, instead of prions?
[1] https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/where-our-forest-is-being...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/liberals-greens...
"A San Francisco jury initially awarded Johnson $289.2 million after finding the chemical glyphosate in Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma" [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit/bay...
There have been many real scientific studies done. https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-finalizes-glyphosate-miti... is the most readable summary
I honestly do not trust the EPA to do a fair review here, given how deep the connections between big business and government are. It's extremely naïve to assume this was a completely unbiased, purely scientific undertaking.
Your point is fair too, that juries tend to be swayed by emotion. Unfortunately, unless a true third party does an actual scientific review, I'll be avoiding the stuff.
New Brunswick also carried on with heavy spraying of DDT into the 1980s stopping much later than most places.
There have been more diseased moose sightings in recent years too.
What about the possibility of contaminated seafood?
So many possibilities. Quite scary with no concrete answers.
"This reservoir has experienced cyanobacteria algal blooms for many years due to high levels of nutrients combined with a lack of water velocity from damming."
[1] https://toxics.usgs.gov/highlights/algal_toxins/algal_faq.ht...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moncton#Tidal_bore
[3] http://www.petitcodiacwatershed.org/?page_id=302&lang=en
"Despite patients showing no trace of any known prion diseases, it hasn't been completely ruled out as a cause, he says.
Another theory is chronic exposure to what's called an "excitotoxin" like domoic acid, which was linked to a 1987 food poisoning incident from mussels contaminated with the toxin from the nearby province of Prince Edward Island.
...
Dr Cashman says they are also looking at another toxin - beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) - which has been implicated as an environmental risk in the development of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
BMAA is produced by cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae."
* please note I’ve had the first dose of Astra Zeneca and intend to get the second.
There’s just no reason for the mass hysteria from governments from what I’ve seen spread amongst my friends - and I run dangerously close to leaving the “anecdotal data gravity well” with how many observations I’ve tracked, deaths included.
It felt like they were withholding some long term effects to keep everyone calm.
“Any mortality comparisons between these two pandemics in the United States, 2020 and 1918, must differentiate between totals and rates. The current US population, a little more than 330 million, is more than three times larger than the population in 1918, estimated at 105 million. The 675,000 deaths attributed to the influenza epidemic made up 0.64 percent of the total population, a little more than six in every thousand people. By contrast, the more than 500,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 make up about 0.15 percent of the total population, or between one and two in every thousand people. If COVID-19 caused deaths at the same rate as the 1918 epidemic, the total would approach two million. Even the disturbing projections of more than to 600,000 deaths by July 1, 2021, would still remain below the rates recorded in the earlier epidemic.“
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hblog20210329.5129...
So, by one token, you could say we did better through the response of drastic measures...
Or we could note that the world didn’t perform wide scale testing in the 1918-1919 pandemic to determine how many other seemingly unrelated deaths also contained Spanish Flu, or how many pandemic cases they really had back then.
So without knowing how many contracted both sets of viruses, it’s tough to make a call on the R0, but could a rough approximation of a pandemic's severity could be the proportion of populations, strata by types (age, whatever you’d like), that experienced fatalities?
If so, does that mean the flu then was worse? What was the world response at that time? I’ll bore you less and say that the measures taken then were no where near as strict as those now.
So comparing that response to this new worlds response... why does there appear to be a disproportionate response that appears more strict in this age than the last?
Many possible answers can fit the set of facts above... one extremely unlikely answer I’ve entertained is that the Covid-19 infection is latent in nature and could cause issues down the line.
Prions share in that characteristic in some research... as in they have a latent emergence that some have been thought to be misdiagnosed as dementia or the like, when in fact it is probably mad cow disease.
So those super, super loose correlations I look at and say, “hmm if someone tells me Covid causes a latent prion disease with solid facts, I wouldn’t be surprised” — I’m mot advocating that is what’s happening, I’m just saying ruling it out as completely invalid without evidence is a little short sighted.
There's no need to come up with a new conspiracy theory about COVID every day. The facts are way more boring, but it all does ultimately check out.
Not to mention, the initial death tolls in the unprepared places, like Lombardia in Italy or Iran, should be motivation enough for a quick and decisive response. Unfortunately, neither the US nor Europe nor Russia were smart enough to take such an approach, and instead of a quick and thorough lockdown + contact tracing that would have hurt daily life for maybe 2 months before back to normal, with almost no casualties (see Vietnam to note that this was entirely possible), we are getting 2 years of lukewarm responses that leave the same order of magnitude of deaths as the 1918 pandemic.
To your point, we are more medically advanced and can track cell phones across the globe, which in some ideas could mean we need to respond less in an aggressive amputation of economies and more focused proper risk assessments - which also means I would have advocated from the beginning to ground all travel (air esp) and any economic activity to assess the situation for a month or two.
So when evaluating Italy or Iran, we should be doing genetic testing and massive analysis on who gets severe vs mild cases, and is is a heritable trait that could explain anomalies in various communities.
Again, beautiful discussion... not saying you’re wrong, just leaving options open.
> "It's quite disturbing because, for instance, a patient would tell his wife: 'Sorry ma'am you cannot get in bed, I'm a married man' and even if the wife gives her name, he'd say: 'You're not the real one,'" Dr Marrero says.
You could spice up a lot of marriages if you could harmlessly cause Capgras delusion for a few hours
I decide I want to try a bit of "something new", and I pay someone to induce a Capgras delusion in me. At which point, my wife seems like an imposter. I wish to have sex with this new person, and I am also sure my real wife has given me permission to, prior to this. You can tell me as much as you like that it's "really" my wife, but, in my delusion, I am quite sure it's just someone who looks like her, and delightfully and consentfully have sex with the imposter new person -- who is giving their consent the whole time -- with all the thrill that entails. Afterwards, the delusion wears off, and I realise it was just sex with my wife. Everyone has consented at every point to this.
If I am suffering a delusion, and you know that, then you know that I am not mentally competent. You know that, if I agree to something, I do not correctly understand what I am agreeing to. Any expression of consent you extract from me is invalid.
The consent during cannot be valid. It's not informed: in fact it's specifically misled, and that is known to the other participant.
[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
Your vaping reference seems odd.
It's just interesting to think about.
Is it? Your line of thinking is really confusing to me. The likelihood of this happening by accident is effectively 0%. Even if it was intentional, this makes even less sense. Because then the person would not only have to find some prions to put in their vape, they would also have to inhale it themselves to then blow it into other people's faces?
I just really don't understand where you're coming from or why you would say any of this.