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Comment by rndude | Hacker News Reader

Prions are incredible hard to destroy.

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.`

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Iirc hospitals that treat patients with prion diseases incinerate all materials that contact the patients. I don't know how they sanitize the rooms but it can't be cheap or eco friendly.

Chemical agents which cause protein-crosslinking would be the preferred method - you can broadly make every side-group reactive and cause them all to stitch together with anything else organic, which tends to inactivate them (makes them a big blob which can't do much).

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.

Do you have an example of such a chemical being used to effectively remediate prion contaminated environments?

Apparently not: I was thinking glutaraldehyde which is used for cleaning in hospitals but reading up the advice for prions is explicitly opposed to cross-linking agents.

Which makes sense I guess but it's also scary.

You raised my hopes and dashed them exquisitely.

Until we have better, cheaper, and less error prone methods of remediating prion diseases they're the #1 fear on my biological apocalypse list.

Destroying prions is eco friendly.

Humans need a non toxic environment. Plants, and life in general, will find a way. With, and without, us.

Sterrad sterilization machines, which use a hydrogen peroxide gas plasma, have been shown to be very effective against CJD (mad cow) and other prion diseases. However they are very expensive, and almost 20 years after their launch there are only 20k systems installed world wide.

A plasma of H2O2 sounds like the definition of a reactive environment…

That's not entirely true. They know that bleach can be used against CWD for surface decontamination. I would call a 50/50 bleach water solution quite common for disinfectant.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...

Are prions contagious through contact or only eating?

That's not good.

Oooof...

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