The Horrifying Science of Prions

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My prions don’t jiggle jiggle, they fold

Prions are such a scary thing, but in reality, any neurological degradation disease is scary.

I've heard cannibalism is a bad thing since I was a kid, today I just found out why. Weird that I never knew the reason behind it except that it was immoral.

I remember the whole thing like it was yesterday. Thick smoke filled the air as piles of cows 10s of metres thick burned. Our school replaced their beef items with lamb ones for years. Beef was stigmatised and beef with bones such as the rib eye steak was banned. The scariest thing is there could be a generation of us who will die from vCJD and we don't even know it yet.

The scariest part of prion for me is its stability. Let's say you have virus stock in your hand (in the laboratory) and you want to destroy it, you just need to add SDS, Virkon, alcohol (if the volume is small), etc, and they are inactivated. You can autoclave (1atm 121 degree Celsius) whatever shit is in your hand (viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc.), and they will be dead at the end. But prions are not vulnerable to any of those chemicals or heat that are included in the inactivation. Once you have it, you have to follow strict ways to destroy it, and if you accidentally get it, there is no way to prevent what will happen later to you.

Prions scare the crap out of me. I could have already eaten the fatal hamburger, and I won't know for years.

Who could have imagined feeding cows to cows would be a bad idea...

Feeding cows to cows seems uh... immoral.

I remember hearing about the disease as a small child, maybe 4, and then asked how the cows caught it. Learning that enough adults thought feeding dead cows to other living cows was not only ok but a good idea genuinely shifted my perspective on adults. I began to think very critically and be very weary of the decisions of adults, you never know what someone would do if others around them acquiesce.

they still ask you if you have ever lived in UK for 6 months or more when you're donating blood.

Chronic Wasting Disease in deer is another example of this too.

You didn't discuss Kuru...another fatal prion disease caused by cannibalism. That would make a great video.

Who might have thought that forcing herbivores to cannibalize would be a bad idea. Horrible.

Prions are fascinating! No cure and nearly impossible to destroy. They’re a perfect monster.

What if someone fed human to cows would cows get mad human disease

MCD is terrifying

I was the court reporter a couple years ago on a Canadian class action lawsuit related to our federal government's handling of BSE. The real tragic thing is it devastated our beef industry, for no reason. The one infected cow being found - which was purchased from the UK - was enough, even though, according to the witnesses I heard from, feeding cows MBM was almost unheard of in this country, out of principle more than anything else. Farmers were simply understandably wary of feeding their cows something so far removed from their natural diet.

I actually just wrote a paper for my classes on prion diseases. There are animal ones such as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy

Its not only beef, but also other animals.