Comment by quantSystematic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantSystematic | Hacker News Reader

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quantSystematic

Yeah they really are scary dangerous. The risk of exposure is low. There are some other important transmission channels to consider. As you noted on their temperature stability, prions aren't sterilized by normal medical sterilization procedures including autoclaving. So transmission of prions by surgical instruments can occur and is well documented. The conventional advice is that surgical instruments contaminated with prions need to be thrown out. It can also occur with organ transplants. Advice: don't read about this if you're scheduled for surgery. It's probably the smallest risk you'll encounter but it might really capture your imagination.

As noted in the article, prions are also responsible for 'mad cow disease', Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) as well as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. If you really want to get into prions you can start with the wikipedia entries for those. They're pretty incredible from a physics / biology standpoint.

The thing the article doesn't point out that is important to keep in mind is that CJD is a really awful neurological wasting disease and it's likely that in those seven years Émilie Jaumain and her family suffered terribly.

"prions are also responsible for 'mad cow disease', Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) as well as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease" ...

and scrapie in sheep, and Chronic Wasting Disease in deer and other wild Cervidae in North America. The latter is increasingly common in the US, although its wide spread is recent enough that little is known as to whether it is being transmitted back to humans through hunting and processing of deer.

This sounds like a twist on the plot of World War Z but kicked off by a newly discovered, highly contagious rapid onset form of human prion disease spreading across the population and turning people into the living dead with Mad Human Disease (i.e. becoming homicidal and deranged while their brains rapidly deteriorate), the difference from zombies in this plot however is that even if you kill them to save your life, you risk exposing yourself to the mutated prions even after their death and nothing can limit your exposure, they are essentially radioactive to be around and their human form prions persist long after their body is gone, leeching into the ground, water, air when physically disturbed, etc.

Anyone care to modify my plot to make it spicier?

Something about the whole world almost completely focusing on another threat/pandemic while the zombie deers are silently lurking in the woods?

I like the premise, keep it going!

And, not just deer, but various other even non-ungulate mammals. Maybe reptiles too, dunno if anybody is checking.

Yes, noticed signs about the deer, in stores all over rural Quebec..

Re: the medical instrument - why isn't bleach used in such a case then, or even as a standard procedure before autoclaving? (Or does that just damage the metal instead?)

Looks like bleach (sodium hypochlorite) plus autoclaving is a method recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), for whatever that's worth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization

Bleach is like $1 and a lot of the instruments thrown away are hundreds of dollars, and the hospital administration knows both of these figures.

I'm assuming that bleach is insufficient for this purpose.

Idk about bleach, but if you look at some of the studies, 600deg treatment for over a day and similar protocols were being evaluated, and even those scales of energy weren't clearly enough.

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