#vcjd

[292-ludovica]

are there like. neuropathologists/epidemiologists specialising in proteopathies on here

I crave Information

[i-shall-not-show-mercy]

Hello, I know you'll probably won't see this.

In the case that you do see this, thank you. You don't know what relief this gives me, from a person in the US. Me and my sister had heard about the disease. When I did some surface level research, I kept on getting conflicting answers, like:

"Your risk of getting vCJD from animal rennet is extremely low" and "Animal rennet is a risk if it comes from a BSE infected animal".

I just needed an answer on whether or not I should tread carefully for the rest of my life. Thank you so much for your response.

I do see this. You're very welcome darling.

Although both statements are true, they are missing critical information about the processing of the rennet and the realistic incidence of BSE infected animals (in modern farming, virtually 0). Always think big picture.

You have to understand that BSE happens naturally only in older individuals. Sadly or fortunately depending on how you look at it, no farm animal lives long enough to naturally develop it 😔😔

Also. Piece of advice. If you worry about some sanitary/health issue. Don't do surface research. You'll only find alarming titles. Reach out to appropriate professionals and health systems. We are here to answer questions.

If you have the education/training to do so, do go in depth. Don't stick to surface research. Best option is to talk to a specialist if possible but second best is to read scientific papers IN DEPTH. Understand the data. Focusing on epidemiology and transmission (look at the dates. VERY IMPORTANT. if the issue was 40 years ago, why worry?).

You don't need to read papers about the disease itself. It might create distress from lack of full understanding (unless you're a biologist in the infectious field).

Simple headlines can be misleading. Us scientists write for each other. We need catchy titles. But we also know to take them with a grain of salt. Nothing is black and white.

Be mindful that scary information you can see on the internet can be outdated or truncated.

[givingyouarandompathogen]

Pathogen assigned: BSE prion

Cause of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy/Mad cow disease/Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a type of infectious protein called a prion

(Image credits: https://pixels.com/featured/bse-causing-prion-alfred-pasiekascience-photo-library.html)

Spread via: Consumption of contaminated substance/Genetic inheritence

I don't know if this blog is prion propaganda per say, but boy these things would give me every prion disease in existence

as impressive as it would be for you to get one of the versions of prion disease that exists in non-human mammals, prions are actually incredibly stable, which i think may be more than we can say about the structure of these peptonominations.

letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:

Idntknwifthislgisprinprpagandapersaytythesethingswldgivemeeveryprindiseaseineistence

protein guy analysis:

it may not be a prion, but this protein still looks deeply upsetting. there are side chains coming unacceptably close together, and at one point the loops are shown to intersect with each other. i have generally been using ChimeraX to look at these structures, but i was having a hard time figuring out how to measure the distances between some of the more concerning atoms. this is something i know how to do on PyMol, so i thought i could just switch softwares and figure it out easily. unfortunately, PyMol had a different strategy for showing the very close together side chains, and simply decided to represent them as being covalently bonded to each other. so, now you get to see some cursed looking new bonds being made!

predicted protein structure:

cartoon representation

side chains as seen on ChimeraX

side chains as seen on PyMol

(the reason they don't entirely match is because one is more zoomed in and they are from slightly different angles)

[isnt-a-blog-blog]

ok so i feel the need to put a content warning here for this one but other than body horror because HLL i dont know exactly how to tag it?

i mean, spoiler alert, i made an art sequence of hunter to HLL based off a series of music albums centered around prion disease in a similar vain to EATEOT literally just named "vCJD" (the name of the disease the album is an allegory for) and like, what do i even put a content warning for? death? neurodegenerative disease? unsettling audio? i dont know, someone please tell me what to tag this because im probably gonna run out of tags trying to put every single edge case

anyway boring disclaimer aside

hi there

remember that time i made a teaser over a year ago about shaped hunter?

i finally bothered to finish it

credits to those under the alias "The patients" for the music and the artist PhiSigma who's cover arts for vCJD i am parodying in this

p.s. nobody managed to guess the topic for this so unfortunately that cookie goes unclaimed

[hoodiesnightmares]

Every time someone refers to CJD/vCJD as mad cow disease an angel loses its wings

[catboymoments]

sorry to go all um actually on the fun death headcanon, but there’s not actually much evidence that cwd-infected venison causes vCJD, even though it and BSE are in the same category of prion diseases, there’s just not enough literature to say conclusively that cwd and vCJD are linked.

(extra bonus fun fact, cwd is mostly concentrated within the central nervous system, so if you have a cwd infected deer, if you just avoid the brain and spinal cord you’re pretty much fine to eat it)

Oh this is true but Alastor is a freak

[iteratorsex]

i think if we compare hunter's symptoms to a real-world prion disease it would be closest to vCJD (acquired from eating infected meat, not associated with cannibalism, earlier age of onset, one of the symptoms is ataxia which would cause the tremors)

cool theory by the way, i'd never considered before that vanilla hunter's condition could have been caused by something other than rot

I'm aware of that. And yeah, DP kinda put this notion that it HAD to be rot

[catgirlwerewolf]

i hate the texture of red meat but i still eat beef in hopes of breaking the uk's 8 year winning streak of no vcjd deaths

[i-shall-not-show-mercy]

Hello, sorry for the late response, but thank you.

I learned about it this year, and at first it was just not eating any red meat. Then it started to manifest onto chicken, then sweets like sugar cookies (the frosted ones like Lofthouse or storebought).

It's gotten really bad to the point that I can't eat anything with gelatin in it, and the only "safe food" I can probably eat with no worry is macaroni and cheese, and any food that's dairy, since vCJD doesn't spread in dairy products. Often it's about cross-contamination.

It's nice to actually talk to someone who is knowledgeable about the disease. I tried to talk to my parents about it, but they looked at me like I was making stuff up.

I read that vCJD affects younger people, on average at 28 years old. I just turned 23 and I don't want to wake up and just... Slowly decline.

Of course we all have to die someday, but you know what I mean lmao

No worries, darling. I know it's a crazy disease and it's very scary.

I looked it up and mechanically separated meat is illegal in the US as it is in France. Which is good because this was the main cause for contamination. So all meat is safe to eat regarding vMCJ.

It's easy to overthink cross contamination but like I said, it's not an easy feat. CJD is really not very infectious. Frankly. Since the crisis in the 80s, the only cases we have had of vCJD are very very few of the people who handle the prion daily in a secure lab. No real proven cross contamination in food.

You're really young. You were not around to have eaten contaminated meat or have had the tainted human growth hormones. Plus! You're from the US. The vCJD crisis was really mostly in the UK and France.

You take all the time you need but with a bit of background check on origin of products and reassurance that vCJD is very largely eradicated, I reckon you can manage to work some meat back into your diet if you so desire.

I know what you mean. This is not the way to go 😔

[strongermonster]

oh shit. niche post to care about, but canada lifted the blood donation ban on people who visited/were from the uk/ireland/france in the 80's and 90's? i didn't know that, that's so awesome

(november/december 2023)

for context:

"It’s [the ban lift] the result of an update to blood donation eligibility criteria related to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) ― commonly known as ‘mad cow’ disease. Earlier eligibility criteria prevented people from donating blood, plasma or platelets in Canada if they had lived or spent time in the United Kingdom in the years 1980-1996, or in the Republic of Ireland or France in the years 1980-2001."

this also comes a bit over a year after the lifting of the gay male blood ban in canada as well.

wonderful news considering canada's ongoing blood donation shortages :)

[oddballextraordinaire]

"few days and counting" - 2023

"FEWHOURSREMAINING" - 2023

Two pieces of tribute art I have made that are based off of vCJD and Milwaukee Protocol by The Patients. If you like hearing music get destroyed in the most chaotic way imaginable then give those two albums a listen if you dare.

[seens]

🌻

people who have received a blood transfusion in the UK in the last 45 years can't donate blood in most countries (including, ironically, the UK) because the British blood supply is contaminated with the infective agent that causes mad cow disease (proper name variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease) which in turn remains in the blood of the recipient. We don't really know what the fuck can happen from this due to the disease class vCJD belongs to having pretty long incubation times lmfao. anyway I've had multiple blood transfusions due to coming out of the womb a bit fucked so I have the British Blood Curse

[carbonateddelusion]

and this wouldn't like

give me uhhhhh

what's the disease. vcjd? the one with the prions

would it?

lmao no you're fine

[wastrelwoods]

imagining a world in which people chose to talk about BSE/vCJD in the same way they talk about kuru and made weird misinformed posts about how only isolated backward primitive cultures and crazy suicidal people eat beef because eating beef gives you a special rare illness that melts your brain into mush. oh is it more nuanced than that? is there some kind of deep internalized bias about the boundaries of correct human behavior that’s leading you to mythologize and fearmonger about one illness and not the other?

[batmanshole]

sometimes i get scared my dad is gonna get vcjd. like its highly unlikely but also he is banned from donating blood bc he was in the uk during the time period where it was common + it can lie dormant for decades

[randomfactsfromcirrus]

Random facts/rants about illnesses!

Rabies is *not* 100% fatal. a handful of people have survived it!

Speaking of rabies, roughly only 1% of bats have rabies, though still be careful!

Opposums rarely actually contract rabies because of low body temperatures!

If you suspect being bit by a rabid animal, go get the shots within 24 hours, 72 if your pushing it, although it can take *years* it can also take days (4 days to 8 years, very wide range) so go get the shot if you got bit by a potentially rabid animal.

You know what is 100% fatal? Prions!

Prions are misfolded proteins that can (and almost certainly will) transform other proteins to also be misfolded

it may take years, but it can and *will* kill you.

it has several names/forms, in Cervidae (deer, moose, elk, reindeer) there's CWD or Chronic wasting disease. in cows its called BSE or Mad cow disease. it can be gotten by cows!

Sheep and Goats (Scrapie), Mink (TME), and Cats (FSE) can all get their own forms as well

If im reading it correctly, all animals can get it? might be reading that wrong lol

Prions are very, very, very hard to kill. you need extreme heat (900f 482c for extended time or higher. go for higher.) and can be frozen for a long while. they can survive out of a living organism.

Humans can get it! there's Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome, Fatal Familial Insomnia, Kuru.

most of these you just can get because your body hates you, but Kuru? that's gotten from eating human brains. so uh... don't eat humans? or the brains of any creature really. or do, just don't complain if you get prions!