
Brain-Destroying Prions Also Spread Through Victims' Eyes - snazz
https://gizmodo.com/brain-destroying-prions-also-spread-through-victims-eye-1830545293
======
wlkr
Prions are truly scary, this article [0] from earlier this year is a bit more
in-depth and links to many other interesting sources of information. One thing
that particularly concerns me for the future is a potential plague or
weaponisation. Prions can be transferred through vectors such as the digestive
system [1] and even via air [2].

[0] [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-
ar...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-are-forever/)

[1]
[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cta/v34n3/01.pdf](http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cta/v34n3/01.pdf)

[2]
[https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...](https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1001257)

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Haha and if airborne prions have been deployed at scale in the recent past,
nobody will even start to feel sick for years, and realizing it was a large
scale attack will take decades + a team of epidemiologists

Plus, it's like the only biologic easier than beer to manufacture, you just
feed some animals to some other animals, wait a while and harvest. No clean
rooms, no expensive lab equipment, nothing that looks out of the ordinary

I do wonder if anyone is optimizing the structures for bioweapon use though

Also an interesting crossover with aSyn aggregates in the gut being predictive
of parkinsons/dementia, hmm

------
exabrial
Even scarier, look at the denaturing temperature of a prion like mad cow
disease. Normal coming temperatures or boiling water wont do anything.

[http://certoclav.com/en/support/knowledge/show/autoclaving-p...](http://certoclav.com/en/support/knowledge/show/autoclaving-
prions.htm)

Cliff notes: 270 Degrees Celsius for 90m. And under certain conditions the
leftover particles can renature themselves.

~~~
felix_nagaand
270c, 518f. Cook anything at that temp for 90m and you've got charcoal.

------
rhokstar
Fascinating although deadly... prions persist through fire, radiation, and
other sterilization methods. Yikes!

~~~
zamalek
Prions aren't even living. Prions don't do what they do to survive. It isn't
like cancer which is somehow, very ironically, trying to survive. They are a
simple mistake, a ghost in the machine of the programming of life. That
somehow makes prions the scariest thing there is to me: the lack of a reason.

~~~
Pristina
>the lack of a reason

then be scared of life itself

------
taneq
And on today's episode of Why Nature Is Horrifying...

~~~
cat199
and tune in to 'history' channel to see how nazi ufo vampires invented the
pyramids

