Scary.
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.
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.
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
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!
> "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."