Deer are beta-testing a nightmare disease | Hacker News Reader

Deer are beta-testing a nightmare disease

theatlantic.com

39 pointscolinprince30 comments

Prions are nightmare fuel. It's surprisingly not as much talked about despite the damage they can cause.

- There is not cure or prevention - can linger in soil, on trees, and on hunting bait for years or decades - really hard to detect, since it takes years to show the symptoms - induce behavior where prions get to spread more - potential to jump species, including primates

It's quite interesting that they're not more of problem thus far.

it's because it's basically a quirk of one protein, which is only really found in the brain and nervous system, which is well isolated from the environment. And while it's resilient it's not like it grows in any environment which isn't the brain. So while it's a big problem if it gets in, it's really hard for it to happen in normal circumstances (even eating it, which is the main vector in animals, requires you eat quite a lot or get ludicrously unlucky).

The only one I know of is Kuru which passes from person to person in Papua New Guinea due to cannibalism.

Kuru is generally considered extinct, since funerary cannibalism hasn't been practiced for decades and there haven't been new cases in many years despite an incubation period of up to 50 years.

Also impervious to heat unless sustained above ~1000F for several hours.

Put wolves at charge of solving the problem. They seem to be immune to the prion and are extremely good keeping deer populations healthy. Is what they do.

This is the result of having crowded game farms, basically breeding deer like rabbits and accumulating them on small areas so people can come and have fun shooting.

Wolves may solve the deer problem but the article is talking about a bigger paradigm than that where this might appear in humans and we’re not ready.

Is it wrong to continue rooting for the wolf solution?

Be honest, do you want the wolves to solve the problem or do you just want wolves?

Saving my brain to became a sponge seems a sweet deal, but I'll take the full premium service comprising improved healthcare, security, economy and environmental services. Thanks:

Reducing my chances of being killed in a deer car crash

Saving me from decades of mental fog and chronic pain that came with Lyme disease

Saving solid money on damages to agriculture, and saving my garden from being ravaged

Eliminating feral dogs that will attack pets, cattle --and people-- (unlike wolves, dogs aren't afraid of people)

Controlling the number of coyotes that want to eat my cat or poultry.

Allowing regeneration of overgrazed areas and forest regrow for zero tax dollars.

Extirpating deer tick from entire areas of the forest

Bringing more eagles and birds. Less bears breaking into coops in search of food.

All of this fixed by the same package dependency

So just the wolves then

Not just "the wolves", what is best for my own interest.

I mean, it's cool to just want more wolves. They're pretty neat animals.

Okay, but, are you saying you wouldn't want wolves to solve the problem if they could?

Wolves are cool. If they solve problems that's a bonus

Yes?

I would assume the only way to counteract this would be to come up with some sort of counter folded protein that we would have to continually take and is always present in the blood before infection. As soon as the prion hits, it would combine with one of these and become harmless. Maybe with enough time we could come up with a genetically engineered way to have our immune systems create this counter folded protein.

Maybe a job for Alphafold?

Fighting prions with prions, I like your style

What could possibly go wrong?

Arguably better than just dying. We have to try something.

Really all depends on how many you cripple or kill "trying".

> the molecules can linger in soil, on trees, and on hunting bait for years or decades.

Given the proliferation of biological life, I assume that there's some scavenger, decomposer, or abiotic process that is notable in destroying proteins lying around...

Are these prion-proteins unusually durable, or is it about average?

its bleeding edge research so take it with lots of caveats but it looks like big cat digestion may destroy prions

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34878289/

but yes they are extremely challenging to destroy

Anyone has an insight on why all these prion-borne diseases ultimately destroy the brain in similar ways? Do they all target the same family of proteins, only slightly different depending on the species? Are there prion diseases that affect other organs?

My understanding is that all the well known mammalian prion diseases are the same prion protein. The disease it causes has a variety of names in different contexts: CWD, vCJD, kuru, mad cow.

There are some other suspected prions in fungi, and there's suspicion that some other human diseases are actually caused by an as-yet-unknown other kind of prion that affects a different protein, but the well-studied diseases are all misfoldings of essentially the same protein.

If you look into the lit, the PrP protein plays a heavy part in the synaptic structural changes involved with long term memory formation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

There has been one other prion candidate found that essentially shreds every other organ system, in fact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-synuclein

Decontamination and denaturing of the bloody things requires going to Herculean lengths.

It is like the contaminated feed that was fed to British cattle back in the 80's. Horrid way to go from JCD.

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