France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
"long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a cryostat—a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures—that she used to slice brain sections from transgenic mice infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE. She pierced two layers of latex gloves and drew blood"
Later in the article:
""We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have never been shown to be infectious to humans,” Aguzzi [neuropathologist at the University of Zurich] says."
It sounds like the assumption that mouse-adapted sheep prions can't infect humans may be flawed.
Is the difference between an infection and poisoning replication?
A portmanteau word is similar to a contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a single concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau
"Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog" in sentences that accept the accretions, whereas you could swap "prion" for "protein infection".
"Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you
wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"
"Motel" and "smog" are portmanteaus, because you
wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"(Aside from actual domain experts in this thread saying it is an infection, that is).
Infectious disease is also called transmissible diseases. Infectious microorganism or agent can be a virus, bacterium, protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Prion_replication
There is a complex dependence on forming fibres that makes them slow (long lead time to symptoms) and then fast (dead soon after getting sick).
Whether they self-replicate or not is sort of a semantic issue. They replicate in the same way "fallen-down dominos" replicate.
Prior to being a prion, they are an already complex protein, but by folding a particular way, they become a prion, which causes other proteins of the same type to fold similarly.
Just because you’ve never tried it doesn’t mean you have shown something.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
So one that is almost certain to happen given some time?
>The only way you can say something is never something is if you understand all occurrences of it;
"Understanding all occurences of it" seems like a good criterion for allowing potentially mass murderous work or not. That said, it sounds stricter than what it is. We just need them to know how a thing works and not be doing "sorcerer's apprentices" style peek and poke work.
They don't need to "prove a negative". For example we don't asks scientists to prove that "water can't explode and destroy the earth" to let them work with it casually. It's enough that they know it well. Do they know prion as well as they do water?
For example dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's head has never been shown to cause injury. We've dropped a 26.3 and a 29.5, but we've never studied dropping 27.4 kg - and as a result, "dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's head has never been shown to cause injury".
Frequently "never been shown" its used as a weasely way of saying "we've never looked at", or "we don't know if"
Who knows really. 10 years is a long time to wait and worry, but it can take up to 50 years to express itself. Just imagine spending your whole life worrying about this.
Wikipedia thinks otherwise.
The whole UK population was eating mad cow for years until humans started dying.
It was well known in advance that this was a crazy callous risk taken by uk.gov
Careful what you read, the UK spend a lot of money on propaganda at the time (to support beef exports) until the case was well and truly lost.
The prion protein is expressed in the central nervous system, which isn't legal for human consumption. Also, ingestion of meat exposes it to stomach acid and digestive enzymes before it gets into the consumer's circulation -- enzymes that break down foreign proteins into (harmless) amino acids.
In contrast, accidentally injecting yourself with material from an infected brain is about the most direct possible infection route.
Source? I've seen calf brain on the menu plenty of times.
(Source: I live here, I'm old enough to remember it dominating the news cycle for months.)
The ban was introduced on December 16, 1997, after government advisers reported small risks that small nerve endings near beef bones and bone marrow might be infective. The ban included cuts such rib roasts and oxtail, as well as soups and stock cubes made in Britain from beef bones.
The ban was lifted Tue 29 Nov 1999, but other bans on using as food more risky parts of cattle - brain, eyes, tonsils, spinal cord, spleen and intestines - remained in force, as did ban on use of bones in manufactured food and cattle more than 30 months old are banned from the food chain.
Things have been eased further since 1999 but I'm not sure we can get brain on the menu in the UK...
Making it a inheritable desease that can afflict others?
I think there's a mistake in the article, her website goes into more detail:
https://soutien-a-emilie0.webnode.fr/lhistoire/ (gtranslate)
> Emilie is therefore working that day on samples of mice infected with strains of human prions. It is important to stress here that these were human strains and not animal strains, the species barrier no longer protecting, the infectivity of the pathogens handled by Emilie was therefore total.
(In case anyone else wanted to double-check the translation.)
Scientists make mistakes all the time. They're human.
Imagine all of the mistakes you make in your job. Outages. Stupid bugs. It's the same with any profession.
> intentionally crafted bioweapon
they didn't mention anything about that anywhere.
> In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols, at least in mice, which “may warrant re-thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic laboratories,” they wrote. Aguzzi says he was “totally shocked” by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little attention elsewhere.
...
> The government inspectors' report concluded that Jaumain’s accident was not unique, however. There had been at least 17 accidents among the 100 or so scientists and technicians in France working with prions in the previous decade, five of whom stabbed or cut themselves with contaminated syringes or blades. Another technician at the same lab had a fingerprick accident with prions in 2005, but has not developed vCJD symptoms so far, Bensimhon says.
> The scientific community has long recognized that handling prions is dangerous and an occupational risk for neuropathologists, says neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of the University of Zurich. Aguzzi declined to comment on the French CJD cases, but told Science his lab never handles human or bovine prions for research purposes, only for diagnostics. “We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have never been shown to be infectious to humans,” Aguzzi says. In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols, at least in mice, which “may warrant re-thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic laboratories,” they wrote. Aguzzi says he was “totally shocked” by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little attention elsewhere.
Take a look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_inflammatory_neu...
This disease was discovered due to an alert translator (most likely translating from Spanish to English) recalling that he had seen patients’ records before that had the nearly the same exact history.
After investigation, it was discovered the patients worked in a slaughterhouse near the pig brain section, where the brains were being aerosolized. Many ended up developing a progressive inflammatory neuropathy.
A human has a fully developed adult brain around age 25, but for some people it is not until age 30 [1].
[1] https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain?rebelltitem=1#re...
Her finger most likely got lanced, by a very thin forcep tip. It was never about “severing”.
"The thumb should have been soaked in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, [the family's lawyer] adds"
Émilie Jaumain - the person refered to in your first quoted paragraph - worked at INRAE and the lab there works on prions that can infect humans. She cut her finger, and became infected.
Adriano Aguzzi's lab at the University of Zurich is the one that only works on mouse-adapted sheep prions. Presumably a similar accident wouldn't be possible there.
That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through which it propagated, and not finding it up-ended physics.
Note that aether was the plausible mechanism, and it mislead people for a long time. The experiment that "disproved" aether just showed that the mechanistic proposal was simple, and wrong.
> The two types of CJD can only be distinguished through a postmortem examination of brain tissue.
Because this behavior is part of human nature. Do you think scientists as a class are are somehow exempt from this, say, by some form of rationalistic purity?
The scientific community is resistent to such things because 90% of the time they are right to be resistant, the hypothesis is conclusively disproven, and we never hear about it again.
Sometimes, rarely, the claim comes through, survives the scrutiny, and scientists quickly change their minds based on new established fact.
Imagine if someone came out with “I have found a way to run 50 compute cycles per CPU instruction!!”. We would justifiably ridicule that person’s idea as implausible or impossible. It would take a lot of evidence to change the whole computer industry’s opinion on what’s possible.
Recently, we see that here and there with covid research where some single lab (or doctor) comes up with theory that matches some peoples preformed believe. When most scientists then oppose that theory, those people claim that this one of those <1% of cases were all the science is disproven, citing all the cases where it was, failing to see the many more situations where it wasn't.
'How to overcome resistance' is studied in Sociology of Science.
Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on.
See: the Pons cold fusion nonsense.
Yes, this does sometimes mean that correct novel theories, that don't have an insurmountable body of experimental evidence behind them have a harder time getting adoption. It's a tradeoff. It's the kind of tradeoff that anyone who actually wants to get any work done is constantly making.
This is a good instinct IMO. Experiments by one person can easily be nonsense, especially if you don't already know and trust that person. Without a physical mechanism, given extraordinary results, I would certainly remain skeptical.
« Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several atal and transmissible neuro degenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of conferring infectious properties, collapsing nearby protein molecules into the same shape. […] There are no effective treatments for prion diseases. »
Basically, you get infected, you die. See also [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
[2]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-ar...
There is evidence that some people have a mutation that prevents them from getting CJD. The mutation causes a small change in the proteins that CJD prions impact (changing a glycine to valine at a certain part of the protein). The working theory is that that structural change prevents CJD prions from being able to re-form healthy proteins, preventing the spread of the disease. I wouldn't be at all surprised if those proteins are eventually broken down by the body and removed.
All that being said, I don't know if you would even consider it an "infection" if the person is immune to the prions spreading. Prions aren't generally transmissible, so if the prions don't do anything and can't be transmitted... is anything actually wrong? You and I are exposed to tons of bacteria every day, but as long as your body can fight it off (i.e. no symptoms and no transmission), we wouldn't usually call that an "infection". In the same light, presence of abnormal proteins that aren't causing an issue doesn't seem like something we would call an "infection".
There's also the fact that some people inherit the disease (as in their body actually makes the prions itself), which doesn't make any sense in the context of an "infection". It's their own body producing the prions, so in those cases it's a genetic disease, not an infection.
Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...
And animal brains, and the areas around experimental research labs...
Apparently 1 in 2,000 people in the UK may be infected.[0]
We still don't know if there's going to be a second wave of disease from infections from that time period due to genetic factors influencing incubation of the disease.
This is why people who were in the UK for longer than a few months during the 80s and 90s aren't allowed to give blood in various places around the world.
Scary, really scary.
The sad thing is there’s a recombinant version that would be safe, but it also costs thousands of dollars.
In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols
Which is to say, with great caution- and not like regular science but rather like the kind of science with potentially very negative externalities.
This typo demands an xkcd!
For instance, a steel mill producing rolling stock to sell me releases sulfur into the air that dirties your property, imposing a cost on you.
Prion research doesn't necessarily impose costs on anyone.
It would be like me saying the theory of relativity just means a theory about how everything is relative. That's obviously wrong. You can't just break down academic terms into their separate words. It doesn't make sense.
There's no difference between a steel mill leaking sulphur in the course of producing steel and a biotech company releasing prions in the course of producing medicines. Radiation leaks in the course of producing electricity are likewise externalities.
However, you CAN research diseases without having accidental lab leaks. Thousands of labs around the world do this perfectly fine year in, year out. That's the way it's normally done. The process of researching diseases does not inherently impose costs on anyone else.
Labs don't continuously spew out diseases, but they very much must impose the risk of such releases upon others. That is the cost. It costs money to insure against risk, even if the disaster never comes to pass. If a biotech company reduces its costs by implementing looser safety policies thus increasing risk to the surrounding population, that cost is borne externally. Hence the name.
Similarly, dangerous jobs impose a societal health burden via workplace accidents. Each accident is one-off but in aggregate, a non-zero accident rate is a certain outcome.
Containment breaches of contagious diseases, while each a one-off event, are effectively certain over large enough sample sizes- and therefore should be considered as part of the cost of doing research into them.
The threat of WMD terror hasn't materialized in a meaningful way: intact, state-manufactured nuclear weapons are the only plausible weapons non-state actors can realistically handle without killing themselves with them, and even that's pretty questionable: it's not easy to detonate a nuclear bomb.
Chemicals are even worse: it's pretty easy for a chemistry student to accidentally make organophosphates, but terror groups don't try in any substantial way - you're as likely to poison yourself as anyone else.
Biologicals are the worst: screw up and they infect you and then the rest of your organisation - or you have a power cut and everything dies in the test tube.
Not necessarily. If you can somehow pull off a food supply chain attack which creates the perception that a lot of food may have been contaminated with prions, that could potentially very effectively induce a state of mass terror. Symptoms take years to manifest; can't be fully diagnosed until you're already dead; inevitably fatal.
It could potentially turn half of a country into (somewhat rational) hypochondriacs, even if almost no one actually became infected. And if it were confirmed that a lot of people were infected, that'd ramp up the fear much more. Also, the cost of pulling it off is probably much lower than the cost of detonating a dirty bomb or even a full nuclear bomb, while potentially achieving a much stronger effect.
>The threat of WMD terror hasn't materialized in a meaningful way: intact, state-manufactured nuclear weapons are the only plausible weapons non-state actors can realistically handle without killing themselves with them, and even that's pretty questionable: it's not easy to detonate a nuclear bomb.
I kind of disagree. Nuclear weapons seem like they probably won't be viable for terrorism for a very long time, if ever, but I don't think they're the only plausible weapons that can realistically be handled. Look at Aum Shinrikyo and their various planned, attempted, and successful chemical and biological attacks in the 90s. They killed 27 and injured over 6,000 people, but they came very close to potentially killing or debilitating tens of thousands.
There's definitely a risk of being injured or dying in the process, but they took (largely effective) precautions to prevent that. You can also do things like use binary agents which only activate when combined. But, perhaps most importantly, terrorists (regardless of motive/ideology) often fully accept and welcome that they may be harmed or killed in the process, so the risk isn't a big deterrent.
I suspect that within this century, at least one terrorist/cult/lone wolf chemical and/or biological attack is going to come close to, or succeed at, killing a large number of people, and I think the threat of future attacks may paralyze a lot of societies.
> CRISPR-Cas9-Based Knockout of the Prion Protein and Its Effect on the Proteome
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Sounds like a bad lab that wasn't following safety procedures. But even that is in question:
> Independent reports by a company specializing in occupational safety and by government inspectors have found no safety violations at the lab; one of them said there was a “strong culture” of risk management. (Bensimhon calls the reports “biased.”)
Why does every lab have to be shut down for 3 months?
Auditing everyone and their processes takes a while.
What could change to make it more likely that the process would be followed? Could we put signs all around places with prion research? Could we implement a buddy system whenever we work with prions? Do metal gloves need to be hung in visible place throughout the lab? Do we keep containers of bleach accessible for when someone pricks their finger? Do we have enough of them and are they visible enough?
IIRC, all known prion diseases are only transmissible by ingestion of infectious particles - meaning, eating from infected parts of a carcass, urine/feces and blood.
In addition, these controls may be based on false and overly-optimistic assumptions about the risk these pathogens pose.
For either of these reasons, returning to the status quo ante may not be an adequate response. In general, administrative and procedural controls are inferior to uncircumventable physical barriers.
A strong risk management doesn't necessarily mean strong protection of employees, just that lots of risks have been considered, documented and weighed in some form.
Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example.
That's literally the desired effect. What you're thiking of is war.
> It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions
Its not the right way to infect millions of people. It does not scale. Therefore not effective.
From this point of view, mailing of anthrax in 2001 was very inefficient.
Numerous USA calamities make a lot more sense when we study them with an eye toward who benefits rather than who is blamed.
The anthrax mailing caused changes and fear in US society with very little work. That sounds like a very efficient terrorist attack IMO.
"The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims" is a definition of terrorism. Death count is irrelevant (outside of spreading fear itself). Zero deaths in a terrorist attack could still be a very effective attack. Spreading something that causes a hideous disease in a city and causing mass hysteria could be an excellent terrorist tactic. Likely better than a bomb that kills a few people.
For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment. Spray them onto crops? Crops and soil are covered in small bugs and microbes which break down anything too long, including proteins and carbohydrate chains. No, in order to have prions in the food supply, you need something like cannabalistic cow-raising practices or other ways of recycling prions in a wet+hot safe environment.
How does this jive with the seemingly extreme difficulty of effective sterilization of prion-contaminated objects?
That is not how terror is defined though. The amount affected by terrorism is the amount of people that get terrorised by the act, not the amount that gets sick, dies or know someone who did. Using your definition 9/11 only affected aprox. 10.000 people but in reality if cased mass hysteria and fear in the US (and elsewhere) that is still there today.
To this day, many countries ban all people who lived in the UK between 1980-1996 from donating blood (https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/bse-nachwirkungen-blut-spend...) simply because of that fear.
I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards - do you remove the surface of everything in your city?
To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale, think about the terrorism aspect - imagine not being able to interact with any surface? It would be like a permanent covid lockdown on the area
The psychological effect of a large-scale area-denial would be massive
We also don't really know what the population penetrance of prion is. It's possible, for something like british mad cow disease, basically everyone got exposed, but only some people got sick due to a random high infectious load, or a weakened capability of the body to clear the prion...
There are proteases in the body that are capable of clearing amyloid forms (insulin-degrading enzyme, e.g.) and it would be hard to believe that for a sufficiently small dose it wouldn't get cleared before it got to the brain.
strange, I just looked it up, but no one has investigated if increasing IDE expression in mice has a protective effect against prpSc infection (when the infection is not administered directly to the brain)... If there are any prion researchers here... Might be an interesting experiment.
Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You could probably keep the attack going for at least a year before authorities get their act together, all the while people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to know how the original group got infected a year earlier if you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination even if the specific product is found)
All such research has dual military-civilian usages. Similar to how all nuclear energy research has nuclear weapons implications. All space/rocket research has icbm implications.
As a matter of fact, all nuclear energy, space activity, etc by all nations are tied explicitly or implicitly to the military/defense.
It's why when our "enemies" ramp up on nuclear energy or space research, we ( the government and our media ) complain. It's also why we keep tabs on such research by our "allies" as well.
If any major nation is researching something, my guess is that they are also researching how to weaponize it and defend from it.
I think and airborne human transmissible prion disease that kill in a few years is the kind of event that can bring our society back to prehistoric living in just a few decades. Hope it never happens.
Viruses have evolved to more easily infect cells in the respiratory tract for this specific purpose, but prions are much less sophisticated.
It seems there may be some evidence they can evolve, but enough to hijack cellular machinery in such a way that they could increase the concentration in the respiratory tract enough to transmit?
Seems a bit far fetched but I’m no prion expert.
Rest assured if you somehow get infected by PrPSc through airborne transmission, someone was trying really hard to make that happen.
I have never been more grateful to be a backend web developer where the worst risk to my health is a headache from flakey libraries. This sounds like a terrifying job!
If, say, oceanic fish were susceptible to some easily transmitted prions, you would have a worldwide epidemics in no time. Fish form a crucial part of almost all food chains on the planet.
The Indians still had trade going with the middle east during the black plague, but by some magic it doesn't seem to have made it by land or sea
> "Common knowledge is that prions aren't airborne, and can't cause infection that way," said neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of University Hospital Zurich, co-author of a study appearing today in PLoS Pathogens. "We were totally surprised and also a bit frightened at how efficient [airborne infections] were."
Does bleach even affect proteins? Isn't that protocol for an organism you're afraid of?
I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed at some ridiculous pH value, no?
Probably not until they had reason to do so.
"Hot acidic environment" is hell when it comes to corrosion and the engineering incentive for medical stuff is only to be as corrosion resistant as you need because there are other design considerations and the most corrosion resistant stainless steels are not the bet fit for building a super precise needle you're gonna poke around in someone's eye so you wind up wanting to pick a middle ground alloy. Picking a middle ground alloy puts a hard limit on what you can do to clean your instruments before you degrade them in unacceptably short order.
I don't know how things have changed since. My medical manufacturing experience is out of date and limited.
I haven't found a source for that, but according to my bio teacher mad cow disease started, because they decided to lower the temperature to pretreat animal waste (such as bones and brain matter...) which then ended up in what cows get fed with. Wikipedia mentioned nowadays they simply leave out the bones and brain from the food.
Yes, bleach's direct action is attacking proteins:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...
Interesting idea though, and really it'd be a pretty sensible trade-off.
Well, I guess the question is "is it in the blood yet or not". As someone who have had lots of stuff injected into his veins multiple times (cancer treatment) I can state for a fact the from injection until pretty much full body exposure can be counted in seconds on one hand. I'm not a doctor but my guess is it would only work if you cut the finger off pretty much instantly (counting from the time it enters the bloodstream). Of course it would take longer from a small cut than injected into the big pipes. I wouldn't trust it to work after a few seconds though.
The multi-year gap makes this one especially difficult to track down to specific events/exposures.
"It is safe"...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-ar...
"This protein, in its healthy, properly-folded state, is, if not trivial, relatively unimportant. Its complete loss is certainly not catastrophic."
I have no idea how to block proteosynthesis of a single protein in humans, maybe more biologically attuned HN:ners can comment what it would mean (I'm totally clueless of cellular biology).
On the other hand whatever job PrP was doing will also cease getting done, and its downstream pathways will be disrupted. So there are likely consequences.
Now if you could totally shut down PrP synthesis for like a week, then turn it back on, that might work. In theory this is possible using a tet-expression system [1], but I've never worked with a tet system that wasn't leaky. The only sure way would be to KO PrP genes from all cells, then CRISPR it back in a week later. Oh, and I'm talking about cells in a culture dish; this strategy would never work in an adult human.
[1] https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2015/april/introductio...
All of them? I admit that I'm not a biologist, so that's new to me, but this would seem to put our bodies under immense stress if we had to replace half of all our proteins every day. If the average human body has 10 kg of proteins, this would mean the necessity of synthesizing 5 kg per day to prevent your death. Or is this specifically about PrP? If it's true that it doesn't last long, then perhaps stopping its synthesis would be a viable option.
Does the misfolded PrP have a different half-life?
If I at my age know anything about how real world works, absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence, and I can bet that this will turn out to be complete bullshit, and it will get known in the future that this protein is important.
For anyone unfamiliar, OP is referring to the Kurt Vonnegut novel which has a fictional state of water (ice-nine) that immediately freezes all other water it comes into contact with into more ice-nine.
Edit: I committed a sin and didn't mention the title: Cat's Cradle.
I mean cancer is not contagious, but it still kills millions a year.
It looks like we can close the chapter on that one, horrifyingly.
As generous and useful on a human-scale an announcement as that was, my first thought was how it could be abused. So too prion research.
Who'd've thunk that muscle bulk could be so scary? (!)
Proteins that are synthesized by the body have a structure to them and Prions are simply misfolded representations of those proteins.
The process of destroying a Prion involves denaturing it by removing its structure.
I don't believe that muscle tissue is anymore related to Prions or structured proteins than any other part of your body as the protein that we eat is simply amino acids or building blocks for creating things like tissues.
It does beg the question though, could some of the advancements by DeepMind help us understand how to unfold Prions more effectively than using Bleach.
I was under the impression that even boiling or bleaching did little to kill prions? I seem to recall that even autoclaving surgey equipment did nothing to them, so they had to be thrown?
Otherwise, yes - there're lands of opportunity in the science of protein un/folding.. but as much, there's scope for naughtiness too.
Seems to me like this level of tech - or, at least - that which may be available in this domain over the next 50 years, could be one of those existential Great Selector/Filter events that biological civilisations might face over their evolution.
Its like 100% bleach.
I can't imagine the prions are allowed down the drain....
If this researcher becomes ill with CJD, we'll know it's because, beyond a reasonable doubt, she was mishandling prions in a laboratory setting, and not because she ate some infected meat from a bazaar.
That's just wishful thinking on your part. That's still not enough evidence in that direction at all. You have large, dense cities in China and people trading wildlife food. There's millions of them in a cramped space. That's a breeding ground for infection, with millions of opportunities for mutations.
First of all, that seems to completely ignore the uneven distribution of population. Your fléchette assumes a uniform distribution. Yes, China is large, but Wuhan has a population of...what, ten million people? It's China's ninth largest city as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... .
The last time something like this happened was in Foshan, thirteenth largest city as per the same page. This does not seem to be a coincidence according to https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-03-18-novel... , where it is argued that in large cities, you have a much greater chance of getting a pandemics from a small number of cases. So if the possibility of emergence of a pandemics of SARS-CoV viruses is heavily weighed in favor of the largest Chinese cities, perhaps your "Occam's fléchette" has actually a ~5% chance of hitting Wuhan or something like that -- maybe more depending on geography and population movement patterns and wildlife trade patterns, who knows? I haven't seen any models of this yet that would predict the most likely locations for the next pandemics. Maybe someone will make those this time.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "next to the lab". Like right outside of it? I doubt that.
Furthermore, some people seem to be clinging for dear life to the first epidemic cluster described and completely ignoring the fact that in general, existence of such clusters means that the disease had already been circulating at that time, perhaps for months. You simply have no idea where the original Wuhan cluster caught the disease from.
Hell, we had no idea where the first SARS came from until over a decade later. Then they found some bats in a cave over 1000 km from the first cluster in Foshan, bats with coronavirus strains the most similar to the original disease than anything else they'd found so far. Surely you're not arguing that those bats were released from a lab?
> First of all, that seems to completely ignore the uneven distribution of population
Half of China (the North Western part) is mostly a desert, almost all of its population is located in the South Western half. For my argument, that means you just need to cut my allegorical map in two before you throw my virtual dart. Big deal.
> where it is argued that in large cities, you have a much greater chance of getting a pandemics from a small number of cases.
Count the number of the large cities in China. There are a lot. See there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China
From that same article: there are 102 cities governed by People's Republic of China with an "urban area" population of over 1 million.
Change my hypothetical map to a square grid of 102 cells. Wuhan is rather large at 11 millions, so make it 10 times bigger than the other ones. Let's not touch Beijing's or Shanghai's square, even though they are bigger. Oh my, that changes everything! Not. Now there is a whopping 10% chance that this happened in Wuhan randomly. Or in other words 90% chance that this is linked to the virology lab.
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "next to the lab". Like right outside of it? I doubt that.
12 km as the crow flies. You can check on Google maps.
Now look at those two maps:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/D961/production/...
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/hubei/wuhan-subw...
Line 7 of the Wuhan metro links the two sites directly.
> Hell, we had no idea where the first SARS came from until over a decade later
There is one way, one sure way, one easy way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis. The way that would have been walked months ago had this happened almost ANYWHERE else in the world rather than an authoritarian communist dictatorship: an independent investigation.
But there is no independent investigation. The Chinese régime won't let it happen. Nobody's stopping them from disproving it. If this were a murder investigation, this would be held as evidence of guilt.
Why amidst propaganda and conspiracies pushing experimental mRNA injections?
imagine the terminator and the alien merge!
that's not how anything works.
It DID happen... and it was terrible:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112320/mediaviewer/rm35735552/
We don't hear about all of the problems. I wonder what else is wrong and what happened. Whistleblowers need protection, not punishment.
You don't have to sacrifice yourself, but don't infringe on those brave folks who are advancing our scientific knowledge by risking their lives. (Although if you're a lab-leak conspiracist, then it's probably too late.)