

Prion disease can spread through air  - auxbuss
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19971-prion-disease-can-spread-through-air.html

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Groxx
Isn't this worthy of a "duh"?

I mean, seriously. A prion is a protein. Say you have a prion disease and you
sneeze: it's now in the air, where it won't die if it dries out or is exposed
to UV radiation like lots of non-air-traversing diseases.

In the experiment: a mad-cow-disease-for-mice was aerosoled (sp?) at lab mice,
and they're surprised it infected the mice through the nasal nerves, which are
damn-near exposed directly to air.

> _"We were amazed at how efficiently they spread"_

The _efficiency_ may be surprising. How can the spreading be?

> _The prions didn't need processing by the immune system first, as some other
> research has suggested_

Really? _It's a protein!_ Sure, _some_ could need processing by the immune
system, or gastric acids, to change how they are shaped, but certainly not
_all_.

This being science, yes, it _does_ need an experiment to show that it is so.
I'm by no means arguing this is a superfluous use of funds. I'm arguing that
believing otherwise _and acting on it when designing your safety protocols_ is
borderline gross negligence, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has killed
someone already.

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jforman
It's definitely not a duh (I got three years into a computational biology PhD
before coming out to silicon valley).

Prions are fundamentally different from other diseases in that they're very
dumb. Both viruses and bacteria have enormously complicated systems for
infection that are specifically tuned to human physiology. A virus is many
orders of magnitude too large to diffuse into a cell, so it has surface
proteins that attach to human cell surface proteins in order to gain entry.

A protein doesn't have this (one can easily assume), but it's also too large
to diffuse into a cell. So, yeah...I wonder what the molecular mechanism of
this is? I have no idea.

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Groxx
If it attacks your nerve cells, and you can get it by consuming it, why
wouldn't you expect to be able to get it by sniffing it?

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Nelson69
Is that known and understood?

Prions aren't terribly well understood, there aren't a lot of them. If I'm not
mistaken there are doubters that don't believe the some of the diseases
attributed to prions are actually caused by them. I know it's still just
theory how it is that they work.

At Colorado State University there are stables where deer were stabled while
chronic wasting diseases was being studied and they are off limits forever
now.

On the upside, it seems like they tend to be slower acting diseases but it's
still a bit scary to think they can aerosolize.

~~~
Groxx
> _Is that known and understood?_

Since mad cow disease, the neural and consumable parts were, yes. The cause
was not, hard evidence that prions were the cause took a while, and a lot of
people didn't / still don't believe it. But a lot of people still think the
sun goes around the earth, so that's not a very good measure of something's
accuracy.

So lets take this from another stance:

You have a chronic, deadly, incurable, unknown-cause disease that turns brains
to mush. Lets study it without respirators prior to animal testing of
aerosoled forms! That's sure to end well!

edit: why do people go on down-vote sprees? This whole line, and a few
bystanders, just got nailed within a minute of each other. Is it a mis-placed
sense of justice? Do I have enemies? Do they honestly think it _works_?

~~~
ghshephard
I didn't downvote, but with one exception, most posts to this thread appear to
be from people going off of their imagination plus a scientific American
article or two. HN tends to have a bias towards experts, and the layperson
sometimes gets caught in the crossfire - particulary if the appear to posting
with some authority on a topic they don't appear to have.

~~~
Groxx
Certainly. But downvotes tend to be followed with _reasons_ where the reason
isn't plain - ie, spam. Which nothing here has been. People can take issue
with my tone in the top level comment - I have no problem with that,
especially because I _am_ serious about what I said; I honestly wonder if this
kind of "safety" might have been hand-waving by a higher-up to save money
rather than prevent deaths. But the others?

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rflrob
I already found prions terrifying: incurable, nigh-indestructible, and not
terribly difficult to ingest without knowing it. This just kicks it up a
notch.

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16s
Nothing to be concerned about. How many people die of CJD every year? Not
many.

You should be afraid of cancer, car wrecks and heart disease, they kill more
people in one week than CJD does in a decade.

~~~
wglb
The thing about it that is frightening is that the length of time that it can
take to manifest itself can be a very long time. Thus, it could be that
already there are many many latent, slowly developing cases of nvCJD in our
population.

~~~
jared314
Research into slow diseases always seem to get funding slowly.

~~~
wglb
Perhaps it is the airplane crash theory of giving impetus to research. Nobody,
en masse, has yet died, so what is the problem.

~~~
Groxx
Well, there was that initial surge of public interest when the cause and
breadth of mad cow disease was first publicized. I doubt many people think of
it much any more, though. I think bird flu did it in.

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jberryman
Prion's are pretty amazing as examples of self-replication. The fact that they
(and viruses) are considered "non-living" always seemed like an arbitrary
distinction to me.

~~~
rdtsc
As I already posted in a reply above, what makes prions so fascinating is that
they are pure information. It is a mis-shaped protein and it is the particular
state of it being mis-shaped that allows it to mis-shape other nearby proteins
and transmit that state.

I find that very interesting. It is akin to an cell automata -- a glider
perhaps.

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Cushman
_...aerosols containing as little as 2.5 per cent brain tissue from mice..._

2.5 percent? As in 1 part in _40_ tissue? Is that not as ridiculous as it
sounds?

Edit: Thinking on it, that probably means the suspension which was aerosolized
rather than the aerosol itself, which explains the conclusion that 10%
suspensions might be dangerous to handle. Is that normally how you measure
aerosol concentration?

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ars
Related:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05pork.html?pagewan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05pork.html?pagewanted=print)
<http://www.naturalnews.com/022832.html>

~~~
tptacek
Interesting, but, not really related: yours is a story about an autoimmune
disorder thought to be caused by forced aerosolization of pig brains during
brain harvesting, and subsequent inhalation of those brain aerosols. That was
a fun sentence to write.

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stretchwithme
note to self: do NOT put mad cow victims in the wood chipper

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rdtsc
The heck do ya mean? ;-)

~~~
stretchwithme
don't make me flee the interview:-)

