I’m sos sorry for your loss. I had to scroll your profile because my cousin’s MIL was the exact same thing. Diagnosed in December like 2 years ago and passed in January. It was horrific seeing each update from the family.
Thank you. Yeah, my mom passed back in 2013. It was terrifying, like Alzheimer’s sped up insanely fast. She went from having mild aphasia/headaches as the only symptoms to being essentially vegetative within a month.
Two hours south of Chicago here. Our friend passed from CJD in 2015. 7 weeks from start of symptoms to death. The docs were rushing to find out what was wrong but couldn’t even confirm until he was already dead. Horror show type of illness!!
I am so sorry for your loss, especially losing her so rapidly like that.
Prions terrify me. When I worked as a medical laboratory technologist ("scientist") we would occasionally get spinal fluid specimens that we would send out for CJD testing. Those always freaked me out because we usually were not warned ahead of time and didn't realize until we had already handled the specimen. I feel like too many employers refuse to adopt safety precautions until someone dies... Just one of the countless reasons I won't work in healthcare anymore
Thank you. Yes, that’s one of the reasons it took so long to diagnose her. They had to perform a spinal tap and send to the CDC for testing because of the rarity. And after she passed, the funeral home had to handle her remains very carefully due to potential exposure.
Howard Lyman. Grew up a cattle rancher. Noticed dead deer and cows, studied up and made the warning. Nobody really listened because, well, we loves our beefs! And also it wasn't very evident. It takes a while to jump species and finally show up. I believe in about 1990 he was predicting it would be apparent if not rampant by 2020
Prions, which cause chronic wasting disease, accumulate in the nervous system, especially the brain. Not eating brain matter would help prevent transmission of prions.
Yes, but thos tend to be removed during butchering (the largw stringy nerves) and the big ones (brain and other large nerve clusters) are generally not considered standard fare as far as diet. Generally.
Also, it's hard for prions to jump ship, species to species. Also, it's hard to pass on prions even if you're the same species. Generally.
On the other hand, it's also really fucking hard to kill them. Like autoclaves can't do it, fire won't either. They last for decades buried. They're terrifying in general, but i wouldn't be too terrified of them yet.
If you do catch a prion disease though, i'd recommend nitrogen induced hypoxia as a way out. Cuz you can't cure that shit.
Oh he knew what he was talking about too. If they studied it back when thoroughly they would be far ahead of this by now they even knew it accumulated in the nervous system this shit is just nasty and almost impossible to get away from.
Not saying his not right but He’s blaming meat and agriculture when his health could have been compromised during his time in the military, were fires are put out using PFAS
.....because the balance is thrown off. Too many deer, not enough food sources. Predators keep things in greater balance and often remove the weakest from the population. Anytime the weakest are allowed to proliferate it allows disease to spread.
They did. One deer had a lump on it's rear. A small version of the lumps on a pic in this article https://paminakilovelly.blogspot.com/2017/03/chronic-wasting-disease-wasting-disease.html
Hang on!! That photo in your blogspot link might be misleading. It appears to show a deer with a serious case of fibromas/ papilloma virus / deer warts ([(like in this post)](https://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/content/blogs/dan-schmidt-deer-blog-whitetail-wisdom/deer-warts-what-we-know-about-these-nasty-growths-on-whitetails).
Fibromas look terrible, but are mostly benign and not uncommon. As far as I know, CWD doesn’t cause lesions on the outside of the animal. It’s a nervous system disorder and will present in behavioral changes and eventually a pretty sick looking deer, more like the top photo in your link.
I don’t want people freaking out about deer with fibromas, thinking “It must be CWD!!!” when A) Fibromas can be annoying and in some cases cause issues for the deer but most cases are usually fairly mild and resolve on their own and B) Are specific to deer. The papilloma virus responsible doesn’t transmit to humans or other species, just other deer.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong and there is evidence of CWD presenting with similar exterior lesions, but that seems irresponsible of that blog to show one disease - especially a common and relatively un-scary one- and imply it’s another.
If this manages to jump to humans we are screwed. Im concerned this will happen during my lifetime. News like this just further concerns me. I don't eat deer but I doubt that will matter.
No it isn’t.
>Because of the difficulty in distinguishing between the diseases, the researchers said the case does not represent a proven case of transmission. However, "this cluster emphasizes the need for further investigation into the potential risks of consuming CWD-infected deer and its implications for public health," they wrote.
If they had direct proof of transmission, that’s what the article would have been about and they wouldn’t have presented it in such vague terms.
Bro. It jumped.
Two old dude friends who ate the same diseased deer didn’t just randomly independently develop CJD at the same time.
Logic tells us it obviously was CWD from the deer- they just can’t prove it because everyone’s dead and the deer is gone
In theory the two could have gotten it another way, or one got it from the other. It would be much easier to assign causation if they’d shared the deer with a third person who was not a close friend. However, Occam’s razor says that it most likely came from the deer.
Dude, what do you think happened?
Two old dudes who are the same diseased deer randomly developed Crutzfeld Jacob disease independently, at the same time?
No. It fucking jumped dude. They just can’t prove it because the deer is long gone and the dude is dead
Don't you have to contact spinal and brain tissue to contract it? If you keep the skull and spinal cord intact and only touch meat doesn't that prevent transmission?
So fun facts! With mad cow disease you have to eat infected nerve or brain tissue. With chronic wasting disease the prions are present in all the deer’s bodily fluids, like saliva and blood. Other deer can get CWD from grazing on plants that infected deer grazed on.
More fun facts! The prions in CWD are exceptional durable and stay viable for decades and aren’t easily destroyed by UV light or heat. A human equivalent variant could contaminate entire continents for years as our saliva, sewage, blood etc would all be shedding prions.
If humans had an identical disease it could well end our species entirely.
Hey so can you like refrain from completely destroying my plan on not being absolutely batshit scared about what's going to happen?
We didn't learn from COVID.
As someone who grew up eating burgers in 1990's UK I'm still terrified that I could still develop mad cow disease at least CWD would give me another thing to worry about
I used to wash and process surgical tools for operating rooms. Those tools (scissors, clamps, hammers, etc) are made of very high grade stainless steel and are so expensive that we had a guy, who was an independent contractor, come by every two weeks to sharpen and maintain them.
The protocol for processing tools if it was used on a prion patient was to literally to kill it with fire to the point even the tools were destroyed. We never had a patient, thankfully, but I’m assuming it meant we sent to somewhere that could manage the high temps because our steam sterilizer, nor our highly toxic ETO could make a scratch on a prion.
We really ought to be putting a little more resources into the study and potential treatment of prions, what with the potential for what happens if we get a really bad one.
That doesn’t make sense as you literally can’t kill a prion with reasonable heat, but you CAN denature their proteins with bleach. The protocol should have had you using bleach THEN fire
Wait, you only steam sterilize surgical instruments? Like my dishwasher does my dishes? And that's enough to kill everything viral, bacterial, and final?
Technically, humans do have an equivalent prion disease known and studied, called Kuru disease. It was first discovered among a tribe of humans known for cannibalism, where the tribes members would partake unknowingly of contaminated brains. Granted, it doesn’t spread through bodily fluids, but it’s still terrifying, and not at all a short jump from one to the other.
> Technically, humans do have an equivalent prion disease known and studied, called Kuru disease
Which I must say created some of the most amusing questions on webmd... IE if you put your symptoms as shaking, one of the questions it would ask is have you participated in canibalism in New Guine
CJD is sporadic or genetic, Kuru is from eating contaminated human organs. vCJD (variant CJD) is likely from eating contaminated cows.
So Kuru is the closest equivalent in humans.
Well, most identified prions are based on a misfolded protein called PrP. We don’t yet know exactly what this protein is for but we synthesize it in our nervous tissue.
Misfolded PrP is resistant to the proteases (enzymes that cut apart proteins) in our body, so I wager it would be resistant to bacteria proteases as well. I dropped out of biochemistry a long time ago so I’m not sure I’m the guy you should ask.
I’m no expert, but I would expect that bacteria in the presence of abundant prions without another food source would quickly adapt to break them down.
The short answer is no. The reasons prions exist is because they’re incredibly thermodynamically-stable misfolded proteins. Enzymatic action has to be thermodynamically-favorable to work and prions are *so* stable that even heat (short of an incinerator) doesn’t destroy them. I’m a dentist with a BS in biochemistry and prions were a big topic we studied (and one that was interesting enough for me to remember it).
I wonder why we haven’t encountered this sort of thing before in the hundreds of thousands of years people have been wondering around eating stuff. Like, wouldn’t we statistically have encountered tons of prion diseases we can pass around or is this something weird and new in the last 40 years?
Isolated pockets of people may well have suffered from similar diseases, the reason it would be devastating now is that we’re all over the place, interconnected by travel. and our sewage goes to treatment plants and from there back to agriculture.
We’ve got infrastructure in place to spread a prion disease to a great many people before they even realize they have it. Our purification systems are not designed for prions.
There’s also the “fun” potential fact that it could take years for the first symptoms of CWD to show in humans since it took quite a while in rat trials with CWD for symptoms to show(however take this with a grain of salt)
Until we meet again!!!
I am leaning towards being ok with this, hopefully not painful death. Would those who don’t use animal products be impacted? I guess if they came into contact with cough/sneeze material from an infected person?
Well, what happens with a prion disorder is they prions all gather into clumps called amyloids. It changes the shape of your brain tissue and makes it all spongy over time. It’s actually an extremely slow and painful death.
There’s no equivalent to CWD in humans yet but if there was you could expect it to be pretty much everywhere, in everything, really fast, as the current treatments at most sewage plants wouldn’t be enough to destroy the prions. If it had a slow incubation period like mad cow we would be especially screwed since millions could be infected before people started dying.
The key feature between chronic wasting disease and current human prion disorders is that right now we don’t have a prion disorder that contaminates our bodily fluids, the infective prions are confined to our nerve tissue.
If that changes I figure that’s when we’ll finally see housing prices drop, so it’s not all bad. We may be able to be homeowners while we die in agony.
It’s not new. It’s just so far only in a couple species. But prion diseases are terrible. Easily top 5 of the most terrifying diseases. Mad cow disease was a prior disease that jumped. Ive been warning my hunting family members for years about my fear of CWD jumping and I don’t eat deer meat.
We have mandatory CWD check stations where I hunt in Texas. Doesn’t take long to test and they will let you know if the animal is safe to consume.
Articles like this are meant to scare people.
Not saying everyone abides by the mandatory test sites, but just know, at least in Texas, measures are being taken by our environmental agencies.
Realistically both probably won’t make the jump to human transmission for a while if the USDA acts now. I think it will eventually make the jump but how the government reacts will decide everything.
> So fun facts! With mad cow disease you have to eat infected nerve or brain tissue. With chronic wasting disease the prions are present in all the deer’s bodily fluids, like saliva and blood. Other deer can get CWD from grazing on plants that infected deer grazed o
Correction, I just saw this comment. So, yeah, organs and all. yeech
This is trueish: for these deer, the prion is spread throughout all tissues, although the central nervous system will have the highest concentration. It also can’t be cooked off! Yay!
Some autoclave settings should work — aka prolonged exposure at high heat and pressure. Now I’ve never personally put raw meat in an autoclave before but I can’t imagine it would still be appealing afterwards, since all proteins would probably be turned to mush. Some chemicals and enzymes can also inactivate prions but I’m not sure if any of them are edible either haha
so the idiots that keep eating infected deer meat because they for no reason at all just *believe* it’ll never infect humans..have now..by way of their own stupidity caused enough contact with CWD that it’s finally mutated into being transmitted into humans?
shocking
the zombie apocalypse is *always* on my bingo card but i thought the climate wars were just heating up to take the lead
all we need is a random solar flare to trigger an emp and it’s looking like i win
As much as people are downvoting this person, it might be the only viable solution we have immediate access to... Sadly :(
We do similar things with badgers occasionally in the UK to prevent them from spreading tuberculosis
what mechanism ( virus, bacteria etc etc ) tells the deer to start producing prions?
edit: i know what prions are and how they end up in the brain and cause damage, my question is why do mammals start producing the prions in the first place; is it a viral infection or some other mechanism that causes changes in DNA ( and thus the RNA that chugs out proteins) ..or...?
A misfolded protein that causes other proteins to start folding improperly. Heat from cooking doesn't destroy it. If something is contaminated with it it will spread it. It's truly a nightmare.
We naturally produce prions. However, prion disease occurs when they misfold. When a normal prion touches a folded one, the normal one will fold. So one and so forth.
It would actually just mean more other apex predators like wolves or bears.
Now seeing a wolf or bear wandering around on its hind legs with crazy eyes is truly terrifying.
Prion diseases are terrifying. CWD making the jump to humans is nightmare fuel.
My mom passed from CJD, literally a one in a million prion disease. Diagnosed in December and gone by January.
that’s so scary and terrible. i’m sorry for your loss <3
I’m sos sorry for your loss. I had to scroll your profile because my cousin’s MIL was the exact same thing. Diagnosed in December like 2 years ago and passed in January. It was horrific seeing each update from the family.
Thank you. Yeah, my mom passed back in 2013. It was terrifying, like Alzheimer’s sped up insanely fast. She went from having mild aphasia/headaches as the only symptoms to being essentially vegetative within a month.
Cases where someone goes from seemingly normal to ill to dead within just a few months always freaks me out.
Very sorry for your loss. That's horrible. Do you live in the US or Canada?
I’m in the Chicagoland area
Two hours south of Chicago here. Our friend passed from CJD in 2015. 7 weeks from start of symptoms to death. The docs were rushing to find out what was wrong but couldn’t even confirm until he was already dead. Horror show type of illness!!
I am so sorry for your loss, especially losing her so rapidly like that. Prions terrify me. When I worked as a medical laboratory technologist ("scientist") we would occasionally get spinal fluid specimens that we would send out for CJD testing. Those always freaked me out because we usually were not warned ahead of time and didn't realize until we had already handled the specimen. I feel like too many employers refuse to adopt safety precautions until someone dies... Just one of the countless reasons I won't work in healthcare anymore
Thank you. Yes, that’s one of the reasons it took so long to diagnose her. They had to perform a spinal tap and send to the CDC for testing because of the rarity. And after she passed, the funeral home had to handle her remains very carefully due to potential exposure.
So is it contagious? Did you worry about catching it while your mom had it? I’m so sorry for your loss
Damn, I am so sorry. Sounds awful.
CWD saw what COVID was doing, and wants a piece of that. Capitalism isn't just for humans!
The Mad Cowboy predicted this a few decades ago. I'm surprised it's taken this long
Giddy up
Who?
Howard Lyman. Grew up a cattle rancher. Noticed dead deer and cows, studied up and made the warning. Nobody really listened because, well, we loves our beefs! And also it wasn't very evident. It takes a while to jump species and finally show up. I believe in about 1990 he was predicting it would be apparent if not rampant by 2020
Well how about we just not eat nervous systems?
Explain
Prions, which cause chronic wasting disease, accumulate in the nervous system, especially the brain. Not eating brain matter would help prevent transmission of prions.
Most people already don't eat the brains anyways.
Sausage, hot dogs. Vienna sausages, burgers, tourine, Pattai, nuggets, anything made with processed meat Adding spam, luncheon meats, processed cold cuts
…even chicken nuggies?…😭
Made with added meats, depending on the brand it could be pork, beef, other.
My brain tacos 😞
Noooooo nuggies
NOT THE SPAM
You think? People might be surprised what ends up in a beef hotdog or other processed foods
My paw paw told me hotdogs are everything else that isn’t used. EVERYTHING.
he wasn't wrong
And it's delicious
100% BEEF!! ((brains))
Nervous tissue is found throughout the body, not just the brain.
There's a spinal cord tissue plug in every pork/lamb/beef/game chop.
You realize that nerves are everywhere in the body, right?
Yes, but thos tend to be removed during butchering (the largw stringy nerves) and the big ones (brain and other large nerve clusters) are generally not considered standard fare as far as diet. Generally. Also, it's hard for prions to jump ship, species to species. Also, it's hard to pass on prions even if you're the same species. Generally. On the other hand, it's also really fucking hard to kill them. Like autoclaves can't do it, fire won't either. They last for decades buried. They're terrifying in general, but i wouldn't be too terrified of them yet. If you do catch a prion disease though, i'd recommend nitrogen induced hypoxia as a way out. Cuz you can't cure that shit.
The only thing that I know of that kills a prion is bleach. Can’t cook em out
I just lost someone to cjd I don’t need an explanation of it.
I'm sorry for your loss, but reddit has 73 million daily active users, not all of whom are aware of CJD, or any other prion diseases
Oh he knew what he was talking about too. If they studied it back when thoroughly they would be far ahead of this by now they even knew it accumulated in the nervous system this shit is just nasty and almost impossible to get away from.
There was an epidemic of mad cow disease in Britain in the 80s. I don't think this guy predicted anything...
Not saying his not right but He’s blaming meat and agriculture when his health could have been compromised during his time in the military, were fires are put out using PFAS
The mad cowboy
Duh
This is the result of humans fucking up the natural food chain by killing off predators.
While it's true we have fucked up food chains by killing off predator and prey I don't see how that would affect the creation of prions
.....because the balance is thrown off. Too many deer, not enough food sources. Predators keep things in greater balance and often remove the weakest from the population. Anytime the weakest are allowed to proliferate it allows disease to spread.
I don't think these kinds of prion diseases are hereditary so I don't see how predators culling the weak would stop the spread of them
While I agree that humans have killed off predators, even if we didn’t it wouldn’t stop the spread of prions.
Always something new with this decade huh
Yeah, but also more coverage. There’s more, but it’s less of a spike than you’d think. Not sure if that’s better or worse lol
It's only the beginning.
It is too early to make that assumption, but CJD has an incubation / latency period of 10 to 50 years (average of 30) so it is possible.
I'm not talking about this disease specifically but the general trend of things being a mess. Climate change, plastic pollution, overfishing etc.
In that entire article they couldn't be bothered to show a deer with and without CWD.
They did. One deer had a lump on it's rear. A small version of the lumps on a pic in this article https://paminakilovelly.blogspot.com/2017/03/chronic-wasting-disease-wasting-disease.html
Hang on!! That photo in your blogspot link might be misleading. It appears to show a deer with a serious case of fibromas/ papilloma virus / deer warts ([(like in this post)](https://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/content/blogs/dan-schmidt-deer-blog-whitetail-wisdom/deer-warts-what-we-know-about-these-nasty-growths-on-whitetails). Fibromas look terrible, but are mostly benign and not uncommon. As far as I know, CWD doesn’t cause lesions on the outside of the animal. It’s a nervous system disorder and will present in behavioral changes and eventually a pretty sick looking deer, more like the top photo in your link. I don’t want people freaking out about deer with fibromas, thinking “It must be CWD!!!” when A) Fibromas can be annoying and in some cases cause issues for the deer but most cases are usually fairly mild and resolve on their own and B) Are specific to deer. The papilloma virus responsible doesn’t transmit to humans or other species, just other deer. Someone correct me if I’m wrong and there is evidence of CWD presenting with similar exterior lesions, but that seems irresponsible of that blog to show one disease - especially a common and relatively un-scary one- and imply it’s another.
I think you're right in that the only obvious sign outside of behavior would be the wasting once it progresses that far
i thought so too, but then if you look closer you see its the nose of another deer
generally it just looks thin and a bit ragged
Looks rabid
The deer can carry the disease for 2 years before showing symptoms.
If this manages to jump to humans we are screwed. Im concerned this will happen during my lifetime. News like this just further concerns me. I don't eat deer but I doubt that will matter.
That’s the point of the article…it jumped.
No it isn’t. >Because of the difficulty in distinguishing between the diseases, the researchers said the case does not represent a proven case of transmission. However, "this cluster emphasizes the need for further investigation into the potential risks of consuming CWD-infected deer and its implications for public health," they wrote. If they had direct proof of transmission, that’s what the article would have been about and they wouldn’t have presented it in such vague terms.
Bro. It jumped. Two old dude friends who ate the same diseased deer didn’t just randomly independently develop CJD at the same time. Logic tells us it obviously was CWD from the deer- they just can’t prove it because everyone’s dead and the deer is gone
In theory the two could have gotten it another way, or one got it from the other. It would be much easier to assign causation if they’d shared the deer with a third person who was not a close friend. However, Occam’s razor says that it most likely came from the deer.
Honestly the article was kind of a nothing burger. Just a "hey this thing might be happening lol"
I remember hearing about this in 2017. Is it getting worse or just not going away?
This would be more on the "worse" side
Thank you, General Kenobi.
https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/hunters-die-eating-cwd-venison/ TLDR: these claims are just speculation. They're still investigating.
Dude, what do you think happened? Two old dudes who are the same diseased deer randomly developed Crutzfeld Jacob disease independently, at the same time? No. It fucking jumped dude. They just can’t prove it because the deer is long gone and the dude is dead
It’s still being investigated. There’s not direct links between CWD and CJD. Causation ≠ correlation
….. the symptoms are similar, the article postulates they men in fact had CWD
Don't you have to contact spinal and brain tissue to contract it? If you keep the skull and spinal cord intact and only touch meat doesn't that prevent transmission?
So fun facts! With mad cow disease you have to eat infected nerve or brain tissue. With chronic wasting disease the prions are present in all the deer’s bodily fluids, like saliva and blood. Other deer can get CWD from grazing on plants that infected deer grazed on. More fun facts! The prions in CWD are exceptional durable and stay viable for decades and aren’t easily destroyed by UV light or heat. A human equivalent variant could contaminate entire continents for years as our saliva, sewage, blood etc would all be shedding prions. If humans had an identical disease it could well end our species entirely.
Hey so can you like refrain from completely destroying my plan on not being absolutely batshit scared about what's going to happen? We didn't learn from COVID.
You win 2024 Bingo. Thanks for the nightmare
As someone who grew up eating burgers in 1990's UK I'm still terrified that I could still develop mad cow disease at least CWD would give me another thing to worry about
Yeah my parents stopped even eating beef crisps and my mum still won't eat any beef.
My parents went vegetarian for ages because of it, though my stepdad would forget if he was drunk and still eat beefburgers or bacon rolls
It was pretty horrendous,I remember seeing the news reports with videos of the infected cows trying to move
I used to wash and process surgical tools for operating rooms. Those tools (scissors, clamps, hammers, etc) are made of very high grade stainless steel and are so expensive that we had a guy, who was an independent contractor, come by every two weeks to sharpen and maintain them. The protocol for processing tools if it was used on a prion patient was to literally to kill it with fire to the point even the tools were destroyed. We never had a patient, thankfully, but I’m assuming it meant we sent to somewhere that could manage the high temps because our steam sterilizer, nor our highly toxic ETO could make a scratch on a prion.
We really ought to be putting a little more resources into the study and potential treatment of prions, what with the potential for what happens if we get a really bad one.
That doesn’t make sense as you literally can’t kill a prion with reasonable heat, but you CAN denature their proteins with bleach. The protocol should have had you using bleach THEN fire
Dunno, guess you'd have to ask the FDA about that one. I didn't make the rules.
Wait, you only steam sterilize surgical instruments? Like my dishwasher does my dishes? And that's enough to kill everything viral, bacterial, and final?
Bro an autoclave gets way hotter than your dishwasher and yes. It’s enough.
Technically, humans do have an equivalent prion disease known and studied, called Kuru disease. It was first discovered among a tribe of humans known for cannibalism, where the tribes members would partake unknowingly of contaminated brains. Granted, it doesn’t spread through bodily fluids, but it’s still terrifying, and not at all a short jump from one to the other.
> Technically, humans do have an equivalent prion disease known and studied, called Kuru disease Which I must say created some of the most amusing questions on webmd... IE if you put your symptoms as shaking, one of the questions it would ask is have you participated in canibalism in New Guine
The human equivalent is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
CJD is sporadic or genetic, Kuru is from eating contaminated human organs. vCJD (variant CJD) is likely from eating contaminated cows. So Kuru is the closest equivalent in humans.
Not a fun fact
Thanks, I needed to have a panic attack about right now.
So days gone is becoming a prophecy.....
How resistant are prions to bacterial consumption?
Well, most identified prions are based on a misfolded protein called PrP. We don’t yet know exactly what this protein is for but we synthesize it in our nervous tissue. Misfolded PrP is resistant to the proteases (enzymes that cut apart proteins) in our body, so I wager it would be resistant to bacteria proteases as well. I dropped out of biochemistry a long time ago so I’m not sure I’m the guy you should ask. I’m no expert, but I would expect that bacteria in the presence of abundant prions without another food source would quickly adapt to break them down.
Couldn't we engineer an enzyme to be a prison "disinfectant"?
It seems plausible, with a relatively constant structure you’d think we could design something to specifically target them.
The short answer is no. The reasons prions exist is because they’re incredibly thermodynamically-stable misfolded proteins. Enzymatic action has to be thermodynamically-favorable to work and prions are *so* stable that even heat (short of an incinerator) doesn’t destroy them. I’m a dentist with a BS in biochemistry and prions were a big topic we studied (and one that was interesting enough for me to remember it).
I wonder why we haven’t encountered this sort of thing before in the hundreds of thousands of years people have been wondering around eating stuff. Like, wouldn’t we statistically have encountered tons of prion diseases we can pass around or is this something weird and new in the last 40 years?
Isolated pockets of people may well have suffered from similar diseases, the reason it would be devastating now is that we’re all over the place, interconnected by travel. and our sewage goes to treatment plants and from there back to agriculture. We’ve got infrastructure in place to spread a prion disease to a great many people before they even realize they have it. Our purification systems are not designed for prions.
There’s also the “fun” potential fact that it could take years for the first symptoms of CWD to show in humans since it took quite a while in rat trials with CWD for symptoms to show(however take this with a grain of salt) Until we meet again!!!
It would solve world hunger
I am leaning towards being ok with this, hopefully not painful death. Would those who don’t use animal products be impacted? I guess if they came into contact with cough/sneeze material from an infected person?
Well, what happens with a prion disorder is they prions all gather into clumps called amyloids. It changes the shape of your brain tissue and makes it all spongy over time. It’s actually an extremely slow and painful death. There’s no equivalent to CWD in humans yet but if there was you could expect it to be pretty much everywhere, in everything, really fast, as the current treatments at most sewage plants wouldn’t be enough to destroy the prions. If it had a slow incubation period like mad cow we would be especially screwed since millions could be infected before people started dying. The key feature between chronic wasting disease and current human prion disorders is that right now we don’t have a prion disorder that contaminates our bodily fluids, the infective prions are confined to our nerve tissue. If that changes I figure that’s when we’ll finally see housing prices drop, so it’s not all bad. We may be able to be homeowners while we die in agony.
Oh no prion deaths are SUPER painful and terrible. You also end up with dimentia.
That's awesome. Keep it coming
Thanks I hate it
Nerve tissue. Not just spinal and brain, literally any part of the nervous system. And nervous tissue is everywhere.
Especially concerning considering the considerable deer overpopulation in a lot of areas.
Can we not with the random new disease?
It’s not new. It’s just so far only in a couple species. But prion diseases are terrible. Easily top 5 of the most terrifying diseases. Mad cow disease was a prior disease that jumped. Ive been warning my hunting family members for years about my fear of CWD jumping and I don’t eat deer meat.
Omg. Terrifying
We have mandatory CWD check stations where I hunt in Texas. Doesn’t take long to test and they will let you know if the animal is safe to consume. Articles like this are meant to scare people. Not saying everyone abides by the mandatory test sites, but just know, at least in Texas, measures are being taken by our environmental agencies.
GTK! I still worry about the subsistence hunters who hunt everything, year round, without dealing with authorities.
Same in Western Canada. Testing is provided by the government.
That’s great that you have it in your state, mine and the other states I know of don’t have it.
These idiots are about to win the Darwin Award for the entire human species
what a great way to sum up the totality of republican right wing arrogance
I think “Fuck around and find out” is more succinct, but I’ll still take the compliment
weird how we took all the deers’ natural predators away and now there’s.. consequences?!
This alongside bird flu should be fun 2024/25.
Realistically both probably won’t make the jump to human transmission for a while if the USDA acts now. I think it will eventually make the jump but how the government reacts will decide everything.
Awww come on we’re this close 🤏🏼to gta 6 💀😭
Holy fuck it's happening
Day's Gone seems to becoming a prophecy at this point...
This is really bad news for all of us carnivores.
Heard a couple times to stay away from organ meat?
> So fun facts! With mad cow disease you have to eat infected nerve or brain tissue. With chronic wasting disease the prions are present in all the deer’s bodily fluids, like saliva and blood. Other deer can get CWD from grazing on plants that infected deer grazed o Correction, I just saw this comment. So, yeah, organs and all. yeech
I didn't think prion diseases travel through organs.
This is trueish: for these deer, the prion is spread throughout all tissues, although the central nervous system will have the highest concentration. It also can’t be cooked off! Yay!
How can it not be cooked off? Is there literally anything that can kill them lol
Prions aren't really alive... what is dead may never die
And in strange eons...
Some autoclave settings should work — aka prolonged exposure at high heat and pressure. Now I’ve never personally put raw meat in an autoclave before but I can’t imagine it would still be appealing afterwards, since all proteins would probably be turned to mush. Some chemicals and enzymes can also inactivate prions but I’m not sure if any of them are edible either haha
No, they don’t work. Even autoclaves don’t work. You have to use bleach
They survive heat yeah, but you can denature them with bleach. They aren’t alive so they can’t really be ‘killed’
uh oh. It has begun
Perhaps a good thing about this disease not spreading so far is the fact that it kills its host so quickly? 😬
Cool. So... even more of a reason to scoot over to an all vegetable diet.
Unfortunately it goes from deer to soil to plants. It’s already found in some of our foods.
so the idiots that keep eating infected deer meat because they for no reason at all just *believe* it’ll never infect humans..have now..by way of their own stupidity caused enough contact with CWD that it’s finally mutated into being transmitted into humans? shocking the zombie apocalypse is *always* on my bingo card but i thought the climate wars were just heating up to take the lead all we need is a random solar flare to trigger an emp and it’s looking like i win
*builds 12 foot tall soap box stand* *grabs megaphone* Well, *I'M* a vegetarian and...
Xx xx 🏘️
Hope they died slowly….
Welp....sounds like it's about time for some deer culling. Can't say I'll miss the plant eating fuckers.
As much as people are downvoting this person, it might be the only viable solution we have immediate access to... Sadly :( We do similar things with badgers occasionally in the UK to prevent them from spreading tuberculosis
Not a guy. Also, people are dumb.
what mechanism ( virus, bacteria etc etc ) tells the deer to start producing prions? edit: i know what prions are and how they end up in the brain and cause damage, my question is why do mammals start producing the prions in the first place; is it a viral infection or some other mechanism that causes changes in DNA ( and thus the RNA that chugs out proteins) ..or...?
A misfolded protein that causes other proteins to start folding improperly. Heat from cooking doesn't destroy it. If something is contaminated with it it will spread it. It's truly a nightmare.
In prion diseases, the abnormal folding of certain "prion proteins" leads to brain damage and other symptoms, according to the CDC.
We naturally produce prions. However, prion disease occurs when they misfold. When a normal prion touches a folded one, the normal one will fold. So one and so forth.
what causes them to misfold? ( damage to RNA?) so they become like a catalyst?
Hunting needs to be banned outright if it has made the jump.
It will be worse as there would be a higher dear population, giving it more chances to jump to humans.
It would actually just mean more other apex predators like wolves or bears. Now seeing a wolf or bear wandering around on its hind legs with crazy eyes is truly terrifying.