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Comment by Farmadupe | Hacker News Reader

Any chance we've got time for the meta question.. Does anyone have a clue why prion diseases are so popular on HN at the moment? AFAIK it's not something that often turns up in mainstream media? Not even as something they keep in the 'slow news day' draw..

Are we genuinely scared by the idea of getting a prion disease? Is there an actual risk of a prion epidemic? ..or putting my Freud hat on, does everyone on HN share a weird masochistic fetish about 'the next big pandemic'?

For my part I don't really get it, but then maybe it's because I'm british and for us prion diseases have been boring (or rather the news isn't interested in prion diseases) since mad cow disease stopped being a thing 20 years ago.

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There's an unexplained outbreak of a weird brain disease in Canada. People were theorising that it's a prion disease.

I'm not so sure it is that popular on HN. I don't remember seeing any articles all that often before recently with the outbreak in Canada. I'll see the topic pop up far more often on Reddit, but it's still fairly rare. I think people are interested because it is such a terrifying thing that we don't have any good solutions for. So it inspires discussions whenever somebody reminds everybody else "so, hey, this is still a thing" and it makes its rounds.

I mean for the two types we know are transmissible there is a preventative solution. Don't eat dead humans, don't eat dead cows.

If CWD is another one to add to the list, add don't eat elk.

If you want to go really sure, don't eat animal products.

Someone posted an article recently. Morbidly fascinated people dig out more and post that, too. It all performs moderately well so karma hunters start doing it for the points. Eventually, the audience is saturated with prion content and the fad dies down.

the 'at the moment' probably explains it - a lot of online fora have, for want of a better word, fads where there is a lot of discussion of a particular topic for a brief while, then it fades and sooner or later a new topic comes along. I quite like the phenomenon personally.

Prions have been posted a lot about before Corona. If I had to hazard a guess, it's because they're even more of a curio than viruses, bacteria or fungi.

People are desperate to keep "working" from home.

As long as we are not eating our co-workers, I think we should be safe to get back into offices

... or eating the flesh of any animal

Edit: ... or eating plants:

https://www.virology.ws/2015/06/25/prions-in-plants/

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