Brain-Destroying Prions Also Spread Through Victims' Eyes | Hacker News Reader

Brain-Destroying Prions Also Spread Through Victims' Eyes

gizmodo.com

38 pointssnazz14 comments

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...

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

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

>the lack of a reason

then be scared of life itself

The existence of prions is a dead certain proof that creationists are full of bs. Prions are a fluke of nature that jams our biochemical machinery. The immune system in the eyes is down-regulated as a form of innate protection because uncontrolled inflammation could be devastation on the eyesight, so it's not that surprising that these suckers could hide out there.

Strange that they aren't neutralized by denaturing in heat.

I'm looking up Prions: apparently they don't have DNA or RNA at all. Which makes their "killing point" far higher than any DNA or RNA-based organism.

IE: it will require higher temperatures than our food can safely get to to sanitize a Prion.

Why is that? Any molecule can be destroyed in a way?

Yes. But we want sanitization procedures that DON'T destroy our food as we cook it.

The general idea is that we cook our food to kill stuff, then we eat our food. But if our food is destroyed before its sanitized (ie: a Prion which can survive to 270C+), then the sanitization method simply won't work.

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

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

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