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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Pigs were a fortuitous choice due to the fact that they are especially resistant to prion disease

Prions is the first thing that came to mind after reading the description. I had not idea pigs are resistant to it. TIL.

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Perhaps. I wouldn't believe any statements that I learnt today before some research validating it, and even then only give a measure of confidency.

Here I did that for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510857/

I trust NIH so my confidence that they write corresponds to truth is high even for the scientific interpretation of truth.

And that's what they wrote:

> Pigs were considered prion resistant as no natural cases have been observed despite a large population and being fed intensely with feedstuffs containing animal derived protein. However, it has been demonstrated that BSE is able to infect pigs albeit with low efficiency [...]

So, no, pigs are not resistant but more resistant than cattle and humans.

Let pigs eat the central nervous system and nerves of their own race, you'll see that they are subject to ESB and prions. Cannibalism is not healthy for mammals.

Great paper! Sorry to nitpick, because your approach is right, but one important detail is wrong - you are not reading what NIH said, but simply a paper made by someone that NIH provides access to. It is important to remember that things on pubmed can be wrong, or subjective and biased.

See header "As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.", and you can click on "Author information" to learn more about the authors.

That article wasn't written by NIH staff. They just host a copy on their website which doesn't imply any endorsement or quality review.

Thanks for pointing that out. As one says, the devil is in the details. That's why I tend to use a scale for confidence.

Take this example of how I think: OP said, TIL that pigs are immune. This gave me misgivings.

I found a counter-proof from a government website I tend to trust, even if the material is not from them. So my confidence in the statement that pigs are immune went way down. In other words I am not sure that this statement isn't misinformation.

> So, no, pigs are not resistant but more resistant than cattle and humans.

...what does 'resistant' mean if not 'less likely to be infected than something else is'? Is it not inherently a comparison?

Right, that's exactly what I (GP) took it to mean. Maybe there is medical "resistance" term to mean 100% immunity from something, but I meant it in a pedestrian sense that pigs are considered _more_ resistant than say cows, when I thought they'd be about the same risk for both.

> So, no, pigs are not resistant but more resistant than cattle and humans.

That's what I meant, sorry for the confusion. I didn't mean that they are 100% immune just that they are more resistant. Perhaps that's the difference between a medical "resistance" vs the colloquial meaning.

I would definitely not jump into drinking raw pig brain smoothies either way and won't advise anyone else to do it either.

Well, before HIV came along it was thought that humans were quite resistant to retroviruses...

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