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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> For example, prions in an infected deer's feces could bind to soil taken up by plants, spread to its leaves, then infect another deer that eats the leaves.

Terrifying. How old is this disease, and why is it only spreading now? Actually, there's not much in the article on the rate at which the infection is spreading - does anyone know more?

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It is terrifying. For something even more terrifying, check out prion diseases in humans...Fatal Familial Insomnia, for one.

https://medium.com/@arifakhtar/dying-to-sleep-the-waking-nig...

CJD is the more common prion disease in humans and arguably even more terrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt–Jakob_disease

Not so fun fact - the medication HCG is derived from human urine and can possibly pass CJD on. There is no warning on the label, and since CJD takes 20-30 years to kill you once infected we don't really know yet if it's a problem or not.

And I took it for years.

Somehow I had assumed such things were produced using recombinant DNA, but I guess only one brand does it this way.

I'm kind of mind boggled at the concept of pregnant women selling their urine to medical companies. How does this work?

Both Progynon and Emmenin, the first forms of estrogen used (1928-29), were extracted from the urine of pregnant women. The material for Progynon was initially collected in a Berlin's clinic by Shering [1], and the urine needed for Emmenin was presumably sourced through similar channels. [2] mentions how the supply was scarce, as only women in low-income groups were interested in collecting it, and only while other sources of income were not available.

By 1941-1942 they had moved away from human urine to PREgnant MARe urINe, and Premarin was born.

[1] https://books.google.it/books?id=Z3iTsU6_mHsC&pg=PA119&redir...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1661006/?page=2

Similar and just as scary - tainted blood products taken by haemophiliacs leading to countless HIV infections, and plenty of deaths from AIDS.

We also seem to be coming to the realization in the last few years that HPV is likely spread through the sterilization and re-use of gynecological equipment.

Prion diseases as well - they can survive an autoclave.

It's less than a century old, first identified in the 60s and 70s, possibly coming from Rocky Mountain sheep farming operations in the early 1900s per http://cwd-info.org/faq/.

The reason it's fairly new is that it kills the deer, and so requires high population densities to spread. At low levels, an infected deer would die off quickly, and if the population density is low, another deer is unlikely to get infected. Without wolves, and with the huge farm operations that give deer thousands of acres of corn in which to feed, deer are so overpopulated that even if an infection kills quickly, the deer is likely to spread the disease to others.

See also http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox for a discussion on similar problems in human history: TLDR; old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the old world.

do you perhaps mean 'new-world cities with immigrants'?

(Having watched the video): No, GP does mean "old-world cities with immigrants". However, GP meant to end with "that never developed in the new world".

The story, in brief: old-world cities, which were crowded, always had a fresh supply of (non-immune) immigrants, and had lots of human/animal contact, allowed the development of particularly lethal diseases. Such diseases did not develop in the new world, which lacked such cities. Thus there was no "americapox" to spread from the new world to the old.

I repeat the story without knowing/endorsing accuracy.

or even better, let's just say "American cities" if that's what we mean, no sense using dated and confusing terminology.

no -- OP meant the opposite of that. "Old-world" meaning anyone that traded with or interacted with the descendants of the first cities in the fertile crescent (aka anyone from Africa / Asia or Europe).

"old-world cities with immigrants and animals in close contact allowed diseases to develop that never developed in the new world"

Except that the cities in question are not exclusively American...

Plants take simple elements and compounds and make very complicated organic compounds. Fungus maybe could take a complicated protein and make something with it.

Plants taking animal proteins in grains of sand and spreading then over the entire vascular system without trying to isolate and inactivate it seems unprobable to me. They react and jail many fungus inside their cells all the time blocking the pass with latex and sap before to wrap it in cellulose and lignine.

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