#in which tori gets off-topic approximately 4590946 times

[newdougsblog]

So I was bored and started scrolling through the notes and reblog tags for this post and saw some really interesting questions/responses! If it's alright with y'all, I'd like to answer some of them to the best of my ability.

I've tagged the lovely individuals who posted the responses, so if that includes you, hello! If someone else already responded to what you said, I apologize in advance! I just think this stuff is very cool and enjoy talking about it.

I once again want to state that I am not an expert on prions, but currently work in a prion lab, which I would hope gives me a bit more knowledge and experience to work with than the average person when it comes to this topic. That being said, if I've said something that you know is blatantly wrong, please let me know! I'm always happy to correct and learn from my mistakes.

Ok, let's dive right in! Detailed conversation of prion diseases under the cut!

Quick shout-out to @grison-in-space who was spitting FACTS about the transmission of prions via soil. I unfortunately saw your reblog after I started making this post and am too lazy to transfer everything, but I see you, icon. Here's the post with their wonderful addition if you'd like to read about it: CHECK IT OUT!

On a very similar note, I'd like to start with this question someone messaged me with. I answered it in a post, but just want to promote it because making new friends is fun:

@extracrunchyboybutter

Sorry, friend, but I'm literally gonna copy and paste my answer to ya. Thanks again for the question, I really enjoyed answering it!

An experiment done in 2015 (the full scientific paper can be found HERE) exposed plant roots to the brain matter from hamsters infected with prion diseases. (Yes, hamsters are often used in research related to prions, along with mice. That’s because they can serve as models for how the human body might react, and can be infected with infectious prion proteins derived from human tissues.) When other hamsters were fed these plants, they developed prion diseases. They also exposed the plants to waste from infected hamsters and deer and detected that the infectious prion proteins had attached themselves to the leaves and roots of the plants. Upon doing the same experiments with non-infected material, no such signals were found on the plants. Even infectious material in the soil can bind to the plant.

It’s quite an interesting experiment—the researchers exposed the plants to infectious materials from humans, deer, hamsters, and mice. All of them were detected in the plants. These results demonstrate prion protein’s resilience, adaptability, and efficiency in bridging biological barriers between species.

@lockrum

When a regular prion protein misfolds, it can then "pass on" that misfolded conformation to other prion proteins, resulting in an accumulation of these misfolded, infectious proteins. The development of prion diseases is very similar to that of Alzheimer's. Both diseases are known as proteinopathies. A proteinopathy is a disease caused by abnormal protein structures that disrupt normal cellular and bodily functions. These similarities result in slight overlaps between our studies and those being done on Alzheimer's. Hopefully, we can help each other out!

...So to answer your question, it's not so much "asymptomatic." It's more that prion diseases have a very long incubation period. Very sorry for how sidetracked I got!

@wheatless

UGH YES YOU ARE SO RIGHT

Prions can withstand proteases (enzymes that catalyze and speed up the breakdown of proteins), heat, formaldehyde, and radiation. As a result, they can remain in certain external environments for years. They're very annoying.

@morgrimmoon

In regards to the transmission of CWD between animals and humans, studies have shown that it can be transferred to humans. My lab actually published one study about just that!

@fell-reverie

I totally understand and respect this point. That being said, I think there are a lot of ways to combat rhetoric. Approaching this specific argument from a scientific point of view is, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it. I'm not the most qualified individual to get into this point, though.

Nonetheless, this gave me and others the opportunity to talk about something that we think is super cool!

@acavatica

Ok this one just made me smile. I was just there like "that's me! I'm the prion researcher!!"

AND YES, PRIONS ARE TERRIFYING BUT THEY'RE SO. COOL.

@interplanet--janet

First of all: LOVE the username!

Second of all: Ohhhh that book sounds so interesting!!! Thank you for the book rec, friend!

Alrighty, that's all for now, folks! If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Hope everyone has a nice holiday season free of prion diseases 😊

stop saying "cannibalism causes prion diseases" this is a common misconception

gonna preface this by saying I'm not trying to be weird or edgy here I just have an interest in diseases and find it frustrating to constantly see people spreading misinformation abt how they originate and spread

this misconception comes from an epidemic of kuru, a type of prion disease (you might also seem em referred to as TSEs) that broke out among the Fore people of Papau New Guinea in the 1950s. until colonial rule, the Fore people practiced a form of funerary cannibalism in which a loved one's flesh, including organs, would be consumed after they died. this practice isn't exclusive to the Fore, and has no profound inherent dangers; cooking and eating human flesh doesn't have any more health risks associated with it than eating the flesh of an animal. what started the epidemic wasn't the practice of cannibalism, but rather a stroke of incredibly, incredibly bad luck.

(more under the cut; there's cannibalism and disease talk, but nothing graphic.)

a prion disease is caused by infectious prions in the brain. this is a type of misfolded protein that can cause other proteins to become misfolded as well. the misfolding of these proteins results in a deadly neurodegenerative disease. CJD (creutzfeldt-jakob disease), one type of prion disease, is capable of spontaneously occuring in otherwise healthy individuals with no family history of the disease; this is likely what happened to one unfortunate member of the Fore community. most of the time, only contact with brain and spinal tissue transmit this prion disease, so the women and children who traditionally ate these tissues soon began to present symptoms of the disease. the rest is fairly self explanatory; the community has no experience whatsoever with the disease, so doesn't know how to stop the spread; the afflicted die, and when they are eaten, the disease spreads to a new set of people, they die, the disease spreads more, et cetera. this continues until the practice of funerary cannibalism is brought to an end, and the last known sufferer of the disease dies in 2009.

so there's a couple things to note here. firstly, CJD, the disease that likely struck the initial sufferer, is incredibly rare. it affects roughly one in a million people, and only 85% of these cases are the result of spontaneous generation. secondly, the only reason that it was able to spread to such a degree is because cannibalism was practiced regularly in this culture. to act as though any cannibalism (ESPECIALLY in a culture where cannibalism is not normal) will lead to prion disease is absolutely absurd. the likelihood of even encountering someone with a prion disease is wildly low, and even then, if the brain and spinal tissue are avoided, the disease most likely won't transmit between the consumer and the person being eaten.

ultimately, saying that cannibalism will give you a prion disease is as absurd as saying that going to the doctor for a blood transfusion is going to give you HIV. blood transfusion might be capable of spreading HIV, but in normal circumstances, this will not happen. there is nothing inherent to blood transfusion that causes HIV, just as there's nothing inherent to cannibalism that causes prion diseases. yes, cannibalism would most likely give you a prion disease; if you happened to live in a community that already regularly practiced cannibalism, where a prion disease was already running rampant. yes, cannibalism will give you a prion disease; if you happen to stumble into one of the one people per million who has one, fail to recognize a single symptom that might deter you, and then choose to eat brain or spinal tissue rather than meat.

once again, this isn't trying to be some weird edgy cannibalism joke, i just think it's important that people have an understanding of where diseases come from and how they spread. kudos if you read this whole tangent