[HN Gopher] France issues moratorium on prion research after fat...
___________________________________________________________________
France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain
disease strikes
Author : ta988
Score : 317 points
Date : 2021-07-28 12:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| croddin wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible to make a designer protein that
| latches onto prion "seed crystals" to neutralize it. Some of the
| recent advances in protein folding and crispr make it so this
| might be starting to be something in the realm of possibility.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Gotta be some of the most terrifying technology imaginable.
| croddin wrote:
| That idea would be to cure it, prions are terrifying.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| The study of rare, contagious diseases seems likely enough to
| result in an eventual outbreak that it should be treated like
| enriching uranium.
|
| Which is to say, with great caution- and not like regular science
| but rather like the kind of science with potentially very
| negative externalities.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Welcome to the exciting world of duel use microbiology
| research. There's plenty of people are doing stuff that walks
| the line between learning new things and creating ways to
| weaponize germs. It's all a question of good governance.
| choeger wrote:
| > duel use microbiology research
|
| This typo demands an xkcd!
| marcellus23 wrote:
| no it doesn't.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| CJD isn't contagious, unless you start eating the brain of your
| friends.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Yes, it doesn't seem like an immediate risk but I am making a
| more general point.
| missedthecue wrote:
| this is a nitpick, but "negative externality" isn't a synonym
| for "bad things happening". It describes a market transaction
| which inherently imposes costs on an unrelated third party.
|
| For instance, a steel mill producing rolling stock to sell me
| releases sulfur into the air that dirties your property,
| imposing a cost on you.
|
| Prion research doesn't necessarily impose costs on anyone.
| zzbzq wrote:
| It's not a nitpick, it's just wrong. Bad things happening is
| a cost which is both negative and external. The use of the
| term "negative externality" works here.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Negative externality is an economic term which describes a
| specific market failure. A research lab leak (or nuclear
| meltdown, or whatever) is a rare accident, not a negative
| externality.
|
| It would be like me saying the theory of relativity just
| means a theory about how everything is relative. That's
| obviously wrong. You can't just break down academic terms
| into their separate words. It doesn't make sense.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Third parties suffering a disease is the negative
| externality.
|
| There's no difference between a steel mill leaking
| sulphur in the course of producing steel and a biotech
| company releasing prions in the course of producing
| medicines. Radiation leaks in the course of producing
| electricity are likewise externalities.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Yes, there is a main difference which changes the entire
| definition. Sulfur emissions are a core part of steel
| production. You cannot manufacture steel without using
| carbon in the reduction process. It is inherent.
|
| However, you CAN research diseases without having
| accidental lab leaks. Thousands of labs around the world
| do this perfectly fine year in, year out. That's the way
| it's normally done. The process of researching diseases
| does not inherently impose costs on anyone else.
| jjk166 wrote:
| No, sulfur release is not a core part of steel
| production, and indeed sulphur emmision has been
| drastically reduced since regulations made steel
| producers bear the cost of sulphur emmissions, removing
| it as an externality.
|
| Labs don't continuously spew out diseases, but they very
| much must impose the risk of such releases upon others.
| That is the cost. It costs money to insure against risk,
| even if the disaster never comes to pass. If a biotech
| company reduces its costs by implementing looser safety
| policies thus increasing risk to the surrounding
| population, that cost is borne externally. Hence the
| name.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| What I am arguing is that low-probability events can be
| treated as effectively certain over large enough sample
| sizes.
|
| Similarly, dangerous jobs impose a societal health burden
| via workplace accidents. Each accident is one-off but in
| aggregate, a non-zero accident rate is a certain outcome.
|
| Containment breaches of contagious diseases, while each a
| one-off event, are effectively certain over large enough
| sample sizes- and therefore should be considered as part
| of the cost of doing research into them.
| harles wrote:
| Known prions can't cause an outbreak without extraordinary
| methods of spread, such as cannibalism.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also no terrorist is interested in a weapon which takes 10
| years to kill their target population, maybe.
|
| The threat of WMD terror hasn't materialized in a meaningful
| way: intact, state-manufactured nuclear weapons are the only
| plausible weapons non-state actors can realistically handle
| without killing themselves with them, and even that's pretty
| questionable: it's not _easy_ to detonate a nuclear bomb.
|
| Chemicals are even worse: it's pretty easy for a chemistry
| student to accidentally make organophosphates, but terror
| groups don't try in any substantial way - you're as likely to
| poison yourself as anyone else.
|
| Biologicals are the worst: screw up and they infect _you_ and
| then the rest of your organisation - or you have a power cut
| and everything dies in the test tube.
| meowface wrote:
| >Also no terrorist is interested in a weapon which takes 10
| years to kill their target population, maybe.
|
| Not necessarily. If you can somehow pull off a food supply
| chain attack which creates the perception that a lot of
| food may have been contaminated with prions, that could
| potentially very effectively induce a state of mass terror.
| Symptoms take years to manifest; can't be fully diagnosed
| until you're already dead; inevitably fatal.
|
| It could potentially turn half of a country into (somewhat
| rational) hypochondriacs, even if almost no one actually
| became infected. And if it were confirmed that a lot of
| people were infected, that'd ramp up the fear much more.
| Also, the cost of pulling it off is probably much lower
| than the cost of detonating a dirty bomb or even a full
| nuclear bomb, while potentially achieving a much stronger
| effect.
|
| >The threat of WMD terror hasn't materialized in a
| meaningful way: intact, state-manufactured nuclear weapons
| are the only plausible weapons non-state actors can
| realistically handle without killing themselves with them,
| and even that's pretty questionable: it's not easy to
| detonate a nuclear bomb.
|
| I kind of disagree. Nuclear weapons seem like they probably
| won't be viable for terrorism for a very long time, if
| ever, but I don't think they're the only plausible weapons
| that can realistically be handled. Look at Aum Shinrikyo
| and their various planned, attempted, and successful
| chemical and biological attacks in the 90s. They killed 27
| and injured over 6,000 people, but they came very close to
| potentially killing or debilitating tens of thousands.
|
| There's definitely a risk of being injured or dying in the
| process, but they took (largely effective) precautions to
| prevent that. You can also do things like use binary agents
| which only activate when combined. But, perhaps most
| importantly, terrorists (regardless of motive/ideology)
| often fully accept and welcome that they may be harmed or
| killed in the process, so the risk isn't a big deterrent.
|
| I suspect that within this century, at least one
| terrorist/cult/lone wolf chemical and/or biological attack
| is going to come close to, or succeed at, killing a large
| number of people, and I think the threat of future attacks
| may paralyze a lot of societies.
| neolog wrote:
| CJD is heritable.
| shawnz wrote:
| Somewhat off-topic, but what are the chances that new
| advancements in protein folding research (like AlphaFold) might
| let us find cures for prion diseases?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Scary.
|
| I think and airborne human transmissible prion disease that kill
| in a few years is the kind of event that can bring our society
| back to prehistoric living in just a few decades. Hope it never
| happens.
| triceratops wrote:
| I find prions unbelievably scary too. What reassures me is that
| they've had about 3 billion years to wipe out life on earth and
| haven't done it yet. Which means there must be some natural
| limits on their spread we don't know about yet.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Because we have had many population isolated. Indians never
| got black plague because Europeans isolated, but got smallpox
| when Europeans show up. Syphilis was deadly until making of
| penicilin, probably came back with Europeans from Indians. If
| whole world is connected then disease maybe can go through
| whole population.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Prions infect animals of all sorts as well, so isolation of
| human populations is of lesser importance here.
|
| If, say, oceanic fish were susceptible to some easily
| transmitted prions, you would have a worldwide epidemics in
| no time. Fish form a crucial part of almost all food chains
| on the planet.
| 8note wrote:
| I thought syphilis was from America, not India?
|
| The Indians still had trade going with the middle east
| during the black plague, but by some magic it doesn't seem
| to have made it by land or sea
| karlkeefer wrote:
| I think they mean American Indians aka native Americans.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Prions aren't airborne. vCJD and mad cow spread by a feedback
| loop involving slaughtered infected animal brains being fed to
| the same animal stock. This case was a technician who stabbed
| herself with a tool heavily coated in brain matter from
| infected animals. It's not like a virus where just a few
| particles is enough to bootstrap an infection. At least, it's
| never been seen.
| relax88 wrote:
| Is this even possible? By what mechanism could a prion disease
| become airborne?
|
| Viruses have evolved to more easily infect cells in the
| respiratory tract for this specific purpose, but prions are
| much less sophisticated.
|
| It seems there may be some evidence they can evolve, but enough
| to hijack cellular machinery in such a way that they could
| increase the concentration in the respiratory tract enough to
| transmit?
|
| Seems a bit far fetched but I'm no prion expert.
| hammock wrote:
| Maybe we should research it
| Aqueous wrote:
| This article from 2011 suggests aerosol transmission in mice:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020930/
| subroutine wrote:
| To attenuate fears a bit... Aerosol transmission was proven
| possible if you're sitting inside a vapor inhalation
| chamber equipped with a nebulizer spraying out liquid
| droplets containing >2% w/v brain homogenates from
| terminally scrapie-sick mice.
|
| Rest assured if you somehow get infected by PrPSc through
| airborne transmission, someone was trying really hard to
| make that happen.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >a vapor inhalation chamber equipped with a nebulizer
| spraying out liquid droplets containing >2% w/v brain
| homogenates from terminally scrapie-sick mice
|
| I have never been more grateful to be a backend web
| developer where the worst risk to my health is a headache
| from flakey libraries. This sounds like a terrifying job!
| learc83 wrote:
| They used a nebulizer to spray infected brain matter into
| the air. There was no aerosolized mouse to mouse transfer.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| prions sounds very much like ice-nine
| gilbetron wrote:
| You should read about strange matter/strangelets:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| That is an excellent way of thinking about them.
|
| For anyone unfamiliar, OP is referring to the Kurt Vonnegut
| novel which has a fictional state of water (ice-nine) that
| immediately freezes all other water it comes into contact with
| into more ice-nine.
|
| Edit: I committed a sin and didn't mention the title: Cat's
| Cradle.
| choeger wrote:
| There must be some kind of counter-agent, or life as we know
| it would not exist.
| reubenswartz wrote:
| The counter-agent is that it's fictional. ;-) (We hope.)
| Koshkin wrote:
| Not necessarily in a satirical science fiction.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| To prion diseases? Mainly in that they're not that common,
| more like a weird aberration than something that actively
| fights and adapts for its own survival like bacteria and
| viruses.
|
| I mean cancer is not contagious, but it still kills
| millions a year.
| FreeFull wrote:
| Strictly speaking, contagious cancer is a thing, but not
| in humans. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_trans
| missible_venereal_...
| xvilka wrote:
| Yet.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Next, maybe time do the same thing for gain-of-function research?
| lab-worker wrote:
| Fear mongering.
|
| There was never a pandemic or a wide spread prion outbreak caused
| by a lab leak.
|
| They should listen to the science and the scientists, and not
| politicize vital research that we need to prevent disease
| outbreaks.
| ta988 wrote:
| Nobody is talking about a pandemic here. The risk is for people
| working directly on those materials (and people eating them
| eventually, but that would be a edge case).
| RalfWausE wrote:
| My horror vision after clicking the link: Imagine this merges
| with covid and the whole John Titor fluff becomes instantly more
| realistic...
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Imagine this merges with covid
|
| imagine the terminator and the alien merge!
|
| that's not how anything works.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| >imagine the terminator and the alien merge!
|
| It DID happen... and it was terrible:
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112320/mediaviewer/rm35735552/
| _user112 wrote:
| Timing is weird.
|
| Why amidst propaganda and conspiracies pushing experimental mRNA
| injections?
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Jaumain's family has filed both criminal charges and an
| administrative suit against INRAE, alleging a range of problems
| at Jaumain's lab. She had not been trained in handling dangerous
| prions or responding to accidents and did not wear both metal
| mesh and surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien
| Bensimhon, the family's lawyer. The thumb should have been soaked
| in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, Bensimhon
| adds.
|
| Sounds like a bad lab that wasn't following safety procedures.
| But even that is in question:
|
| > Independent reports by a company specializing in occupational
| safety and by government inspectors have found no safety
| violations at the lab; one of them said there was a "strong
| culture" of risk management. (Bensimhon calls the reports
| "biased.")
|
| Why does every lab have to be shut down for 3 months?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Your second quote is the reason why: the administrative
| controls that are supposed to prevent this sort of incident at
| any of the labs inarguably failed in this case, and there is no
| reason to believe they will not fail again.
|
| In addition, these controls may be based on false and overly-
| optimistic assumptions about the risk these pathogens pose.
|
| For either of these reasons, returning to the status quo ante
| may not be an adequate response. In general, administrative and
| procedural controls are inferior to uncircumventable physical
| barriers.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Why does every lab have to be shut down for 3 months?
|
| Auditing everyone and their processes takes a while.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why would you audit processes when the allegation is that
| someone got infected because she wasn't following the
| processes?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| She hadn't been trained in how to handle prions. Doesn't
| that sound like a process problem to you?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Part of a process audit is to check compliance, e.g. by
| counting if there are enough metal gloves per employee -
| including measuring all hand sizes to check if really every
| employee even has access to a fitting glove -, by checking
| if supply orders for PPE match expected consumption, by
| interviewing current and especially former employees and by
| checking emails for evidence of staff complaints.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Someone not following a process is a failure of the
| process. The process should include proper training and
| regular oversight to ensure that the process is being
| followed - an audit will reveal if that training and
| oversight is in place. If you trace any accident back far
| enough, you'll eventually get to a point where it could've
| been prevented with better planning.
| frob wrote:
| It's so that they can figure out why the process wasn't
| being followed and how it can be improved. Nothing is
| perfect and accidents are a great catalyst for reexamining
| your procedures.
|
| What could change to make it more likely that the process
| would be followed? Could we put signs all around places
| with prion research? Could we implement a buddy system
| whenever we work with prions? Do metal gloves need to be
| hung in visible place throughout the lab? Do we keep
| containers of bleach accessible for when someone pricks
| their finger? Do we have enough of them and are they
| visible enough?
| fallingknife wrote:
| The last thing you need is more bureaucracy. If you want
| the rules to be followed, you punish the people who
| don't. That's it. It doesn't take 3 months. It doesn't
| take any audits or committees. If there is a rule
| following problem, you enforce the rules. People will
| find a way to comply if they know they will pay the price
| if they don't.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| if we have some dangerous prion, and some person is
| bypassing procedure, that still is needing some evaluation.
| prion escape and becoming common in populations would be a
| large disaster.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > prion escape and becoming common in populations would
| be a large disaster.
|
| IIRC, all known prion diseases are only transmissible by
| ingestion of infectious particles - meaning, eating from
| infected parts of a carcass, urine/feces and blood.
| mannykannot wrote:
| There does not seem to have been any ingestion in these
| two cases. Still, they do not involve transmission
| through air or through casual contact, but see the last
| couple of sentences here with regard to the former:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984942
| josefx wrote:
| I think the report finding that there were no safety violations
| is the most damning. You have 100 researchers dealing with a
| deadly disease, 17 had lab accidents during their work, 5 of
| them may have suffered fatal exposure with no training how to
| mitigate this? What are the mandated safety procedures if none
| where violated? Wear a labcoat and pray that you wont die ten
| years from now?
| perlgeek wrote:
| Risk management can (and often does) include simply accepting
| risks and their consequences.
|
| A strong risk management doesn't necessarily mean strong
| protection of employees, just that lots of risks have been
| considered, documented and weighed in some form.
| himinlomax wrote:
| I remember hearing people arguing that the Covid lab leak
| hypothesis was implausible because of stringent safety measures.
| jhgb wrote:
| The Covid lab leak hypothesis is _primarily_ implausible
| because of Occam 's razor.
| programmarchy wrote:
| The lab leak hypothesis is less plausible than the natural
| leak hypothesis only if you exclude the fact that gain-of-
| function research on Coronavirus was being done in the Wuhan
| Lab. When you include that necessary fact, it becomes the
| most parsimonious.
|
| If this researcher becomes ill with CJD, we'll know it's
| because, beyond a reasonable doubt, she was mishandling
| prions in a laboratory setting, and not because she ate some
| infected meat from a bazaar.
| himinlomax wrote:
| That is not an argument. It is extremely plausible because
| the epidemic started next to the lab. Look at the size of
| China. Take a map of the country and throw a dart at it. Now
| consider the probability of it landing within 1 mm of Wuhan.
| Let's call this dart Occam's flechette.
| duxup wrote:
| I really don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole but IIRC
| some of the concern was due to a lack of stringent safety
| measures in a lab / similar labs.
| ta988 wrote:
| The article talks about the case of Emilie Jaumain that got
| contaminated by prion while cleaning a device used to slice mouse
| brains. She died 9 years later of a prion disease. After several
| cases of exposure across the world, France decided to block prion
| research for 3 months to try to study the issue.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| At the minimum, some new safety protocols might be needed.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| They are going to stop studying so they can start studying the
| issue? Ah well, this is the level of 'science' we've come to
| expect in the pandemic.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Yes, they should stop potentially lethal research procedures
| to see how they can prevent them.
|
| Its not rocket science.
| pc86 wrote:
| The above comment is idiotic, yes, but so is this response
| by France.
|
| She cut herself while cleaning a blade, something that
| doesn't seem so wildly uncommon that an entire nation
| should stop research on an entire class of diseases because
| of it.
| nemetroid wrote:
| Your reasoning seems backwards to me. If she had hurt
| herself through some unlikely and intricate series of
| events, a shutdown would have made less sense.
| riffraff wrote:
| I believe the issue is that the kind of precautions
| they're using were based on some assumptions (e.g. that
| mouse prions do not affect humans) which were flawed and
| need to be re-evaluated. It's not just "don't cut
| yourself, duh".
| nosianu wrote:
| That was not the case that prompted this reaction, so I
| don't understand the reasoning behind your comment?
|
| The case that prompted this reaction is described in the
| first paragraph of the linked article. The one you refer
| to in the second one as an older case.
|
| There is no mention of the older case having lead to any
| shutdowns, making it hard to follow your train of
| thoughts, since you specifically refer to this older
| case.
| smolder wrote:
| Maybe researchers who kill themselves with dangerous
| infectious agents are a sign that precautions are
| inadequate and deserve scrutiny.
| Reventlov wrote:
| No, they're gonna stop studying until they have reviewed all
| the security protocols regarding the handling of prions, and
| this, nationwide.
| aqsalose wrote:
| There are reviews and then there are reviews: Rubber stamp
| security reviews happen.
|
| I don't know much about this particular case, but I think,
| in general, a trustworthy review needs to be conducted by
| an independent body with genuine power (edit. and _desire_
| ) to order things to halt permanently if they can not be
| made safe enough (and then there is a separate question of
| who makes the call "what is safe enough").
| bluGill wrote:
| >(and then there is a separate question of who makes the
| call "what is safe enough").
|
| This is hard. If there isn't the right incentive they can
| decide nothing is safe enough. This ensures safety now,
| but it means that if a cure is possible it won't be
| discovered (or anything else useful from the research).
| The FDA has been accused of needlessly holding up useful
| drugs on this grounds (I'm not going to comment on if
| true or not)
| antattack wrote:
| They want to make sure that disease did not come from other
| places than the lab, which would be a concern to the
| general public. However unlikely, it's a possibility that
| has to be eliminated.
| detritus wrote:
| This coming so close after the announcement by DeepMind that
| they're releasing the data on hundreds of thousands of protein
| folding structures has me with a growing knot in my stomach.
|
| As generous and useful on a human-scale an announcement as that
| was, my first thought was how it could be abused. So too prion
| research.
|
| Who'd've thunk that muscle bulk could be so scary? (!)
| peytoncasper wrote:
| I just wanted to add a comment about your muscle bulk comment.
| Protein in protein shakes is usually denatured or rather just a
| collection of amino acids.
|
| Proteins that are synthesized by the body have a structure to
| them and Prions are simply misfolded representations of those
| proteins.
|
| The process of destroying a Prion involves denaturing it by
| removing its structure.
|
| I don't believe that muscle tissue is anymore related to Prions
| or structured proteins than any other part of your body as the
| protein that we eat is simply amino acids or building blocks
| for creating things like tissues.
|
| It does beg the question though, could some of the advancements
| by DeepMind help us understand how to unfold Prions more
| effectively than using Bleach.
| detritus wrote:
| Just for clarity - my last line there was me being facetious!
|
| I was under the impression that even boiling or bleaching did
| little to kill prions? I seem to recall that even autoclaving
| surgey equipment did nothing to them, so they had to be
| thrown?
|
| Otherwise, yes - there're lands of opportunity in the science
| of protein un/folding.. but as much, there's scope for
| naughtiness too.
|
| Seems to me like this level of tech - or, at least - that
| which may be available in this domain over the next 50 years,
| could be one of those existential Great Selector/Filter
| events that biological civilisations might face over their
| evolution.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| Ah apologies. And Bleach is utilized in the labs to
| denature the prions appropriately. You're correct that
| autoclaves are not used as heat unfortunately is not enough
| to kill them.
|
| Its like 100% bleach.
| tomrod wrote:
| Prions are system glitches. It's nuts to me to think that a
| complex mix of chemicals can cause slow but fundamental
| decoherence in a living system.
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| Hm:
|
| "long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she
| stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a
| cryostat--a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures
| --that she used to slice brain sections from _transgenic mice
| infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE_. She pierced two
| layers of latex gloves and drew blood "
|
| Later in the article:
|
| ""We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which
| have never been shown to be infectious to humans," Aguzzi
| [neuropathologist at the University of Zurich] says."
|
| It sounds like the assumption that mouse-adapted sheep prions
| can't infect humans may be flawed.
| jonplackett wrote:
| "Never been shown to" is the kind of false speak I keep hearing
| from the government and media.
|
| Just because you've never tried it doesn't mean you have shown
| something.
| jarvic wrote:
| There is a difference between "never been shown to" and
| "shown to never".
| acoard wrote:
| Scientists (and logicians) avoid saying "shown to never",
| as it's much harder - almost impossible - to prove a
| negative[0]. This is also a black swan[1] type situation.
| The only way you can say something is never something is if
| you understand all occurrences of it; otherwise you can
| only report on what you've been shown.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosop
| hy)#P...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is also a black swan[1] type situation_
|
| So one that is almost certain to happen given some time?
|
| > _The only way you can say something is never something
| is if you understand all occurrences of it;_
|
| "Understanding all occurences of it" seems like a good
| criterion for allowing potentially mass murderous work or
| not. That said, it sounds stricter than what it is. We
| just need them to know how a thing works and not be doing
| "sorcerer's apprentices" style peek and poke work.
|
| They don't need to "prove a negative". For example we
| don't asks scientists to prove that "water can't explode
| and destroy the earth" to let them work with it casually.
| It's enough that they know it well. Do they know prion as
| well as they do water?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Yes but the problem with "never been shown" is how it's
| often used to "take advantage" of people's interpretation
| like what you list above.
|
| For example dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's head has
| never been shown to cause injury. We've dropped a 26.3
| and a 29.5, but we've never studied dropping 27.4 kg -
| and as a result, "dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's
| head has never been shown to cause injury".
|
| Frequently "never been shown" its used as a weasely way
| of saying "we've never looked at", or "we don't know if"
| jonplackett wrote:
| That was meant to be my point, the down vote makes me think
| I didn't make it clearly enough...
| pmichaud wrote:
| You're absolutely right, but it's also true that the phrase
| "never been shown to" most often functions in a sentence
| more like "doesn't/can't happen" than "we have no idea."
| Symmetry wrote:
| Yes but many experts take "never been shown to" to mean
| that we ought to act as if it doesn't for now. That's an
| important and useful social mechanism in the laborious
| process of constructing a solid edifice of truth from the
| crooked timber of humanity. But it's unwise when
| considering public health responses.
| bitL wrote:
| "There is no evidence that..." is my recent favorite.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yeah that's been constant. There was 'no evidence that
| delta variant is more dangerous' for white a while, until
| there was actually some evidence to go on.
| philshem wrote:
| The full section with the Aguzzi quote adds context, including
| his declining to comment on the French case.
|
| > The scientific community has long recognized that handling
| prions is dangerous and an occupational risk for
| neuropathologists, says neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of the
| University of Zurich. Aguzzi declined to comment on the French
| CJD cases, but told Science his lab never handles human or
| bovine prions for research purposes, only for diagnostics. "We
| conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have
| never been shown to be infectious to humans," Aguzzi says. In a
| 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through
| aerosols, at least in mice, which "may warrant re-thinking on
| prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic
| laboratories," they wrote. Aguzzi says he was "totally shocked"
| by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent
| aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little
| attention elsewhere.
| echelon wrote:
| When lab workers studying the very thing they know best can
| make lethal mistakes, it's surprising that so many jumped to
| quell any hypothesis of a covid lab leak.
|
| Scientists make mistakes all the time. They're human.
|
| Imagine all of the mistakes you make in your job. Outages.
| Stupid bugs. It's the same with any profession.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| You are conflating lab leak with intentionally crafted
| bioweapon.
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| > You are conflating lab leak with intentionally crafted
| bioweapon.
|
| > intentionally crafted bioweapon
|
| they didn't mention anything about that anywhere.
| echelon wrote:
| A bioweapon that can't be targeted doesn't seem very
| useful, does it?
| yonaguska wrote:
| Could easily be both. Bioweapon development that was
| accidentally leaked.
| [deleted]
| garmaine wrote:
| Is he? He only talked about lab leaks. You brought up the
| nonsense bioweapon theory.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| But then he goes to the HN endorsed point of "lab leak"
| hypothesis.
| ekianjo wrote:
| "infect" is not the right word. Prions are not viruses, they do
| not replicate, they ravage other proteins in their surroundings
| by misfolding them over and over again until it becomes a fatal
| pathology.
| dekhn wrote:
| Techynically you are incorrect. Infect is the right word.
| Worked at the institution that established this. (I do not
| believe that koch's postulates cover all cases of
| 'infection').
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Don't prions reproduce by re-folding other proteins to match
| themselves?
| gostsamo wrote:
| Infection means contamination / spoilage.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/infection
| jjk166 wrote:
| Prions contaminate
| ekster wrote:
| Infect is definitely the right word here.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Prions are considered infectious, although when they were
| first proposed it was essentially heresy that something could
| be infectious without containing any nucleic acid (DNA/RNA).
|
| Whether they self-replicate or not is sort of a semantic
| issue. They replicate in the same way "fallen-down dominos"
| replicate.
|
| Prior to being a prion, they are an already complex protein,
| but by folding a particular way, they become a prion, which
| causes other proteins of the same type to fold similarly.
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| The word "prion" is actually a contraction of the words
| "protein" and "infection". (edit: although I agree it's not
| what one might conventionally think of as an "infection")
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| What things are named and what they are don't necessarily
| coincide. E.g.: native americans are called "indians".
| ben_w wrote:
| A better etymological example would be that Stonehenge,
| after which the category "henge" is named, isn't a henge.
|
| (Aside from actual domain experts in this thread saying
| it is an infection, that is).
| jjk166 wrote:
| But typically they do, and this is one of that vast
| majority of cases.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I know, but it's a poor choice of word since it's nothing
| like viruses or bacteria.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Viruses are nothing like bacteria, so it doesn't make any
| sense to restrict the term of "infection" to those two.
| knicholes wrote:
| Contraction or portmanteau?
| pygy_ wrote:
| Contraction :
|
| _A portmanteau word is similar to a contraction, but
| contractions are formed from words that would otherwise
| appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make
| don 't, whereas a portmanteau is formed by combining two
| or more existing words that all relate to a single
| concept._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau
|
| "Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you wouldn't
| put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog" in sentences that accept
| the accretions, whereas you could swap "prion" for
| "protein infection".
| dnautics wrote:
| It's a self-replicating protein fold. Infection is correct.
| (I Did prion research in grad school)
| nabla9 wrote:
| Infect is exactly the right word.
|
| Infectious disease is also called transmissible diseases.
| Infectious microorganism or agent can be a virus, bacterium,
| protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus.
| webmaven wrote:
| Don't forget memes. Not the current pop-culture meaning of
| the term, but the original Dawkins version, which stretches
| to cover things like mass-hysteria.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| It seems like gain of function research is going on all over
| the place. Maybe Alex Jones isn't total conspiracy nut, as the
| media portrays him. He's just a head of what is commonly
| disseminated. I watched an interview with him where he claims
| to read a lot of research papers daily. Literally a dystopian
| science fiction fantasy of a virus man made in a lab infecting
| the world has a good likely hood of being true.
| disabled wrote:
| Keep in mind that the researcher was only 23 years old at the
| time when the lab accident happened. In some ways, she was
| basically a kid.
|
| A human has a fully developed brain around age 25, but for some
| people it is not until age 30 [1].
|
| [1] https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-
| brain?rebelltitem=1#re...
| mberning wrote:
| Also I would be fine with studying prions in general. But I
| don't think creating new ones is such a great idea.
| bamboo2 wrote:
| " vCJD or "classic" CJD, which is not known to be caused by
| prions from animals. Classic CJD strikes an estimated one
| person per million. Some 80% of cases are sporadic, meaning
| they have no known cause, "
|
| Who knows really. 10 years is a long time to wait and worry,
| but it can take up to 50 years to express itself. Just imagine
| spending your whole life worrying about this.
| teknopaul wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalop.
| ..
|
| Wikipedia thinks otherwise.
|
| The whole UK population was eating mad cow for years until
| humans started dying.
|
| It was well known in advance that this was a crazy callous
| risk taken by uk.gov
|
| Careful what you read, the UK spend a lot of money on
| propaganda at the time (to support beef exports) until the
| case was well and truly lost.
| cstross wrote:
| Bear in mind that eating muscle tissue from infected
| animals is a much lower risk than innoculating yourself
| directly with brain matter from an infected animal.
|
| The prion protein is expressed in the central nervous
| system, which isn't legal for human consumption. Also,
| ingestion of meat exposes it to stomach acid and digestive
| enzymes before it gets into the consumer's circulation --
| enzymes that break down foreign proteins into (harmless)
| amino acids.
|
| In contrast, accidentally injecting yourself with material
| from an infected brain is about the most direct possible
| infection route.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Mammalian proteins don't differ from each other all that
| much so it makes sense the prions of any other mammal could
| potentially infect humans. Though the further away in the
| evolutionary tree the less likely I imagine.
| bvm wrote:
| Disclaimer: I know nothing about prions.
|
| I think there's a mistake in the article, her website goes into
| more detail:
|
| https://soutien-a-emilie0.webnode.fr/lhistoire/ (gtranslate)
|
| > Emilie is therefore working that day on samples of mice
| infected with strains of human prions. It is important to
| stress here that these were human strains and not animal
| strains, the species barrier no longer protecting, the
| infectivity of the pathogens handled by Emilie was therefore
| total.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Emilie travaille donc ce jour la sur des echantillons de
| souris infectees avec des souches de prions humaines. ll est
| important de souligner ici qu'il s'agissait de souches
| humaines et non de souches animales, la barriere d'espece ne
| protegeant plus, l'infectiosite des pathogenes manipules par
| Emilie etait donc totale.
|
| (In case anyone else wanted to double-check the translation.)
| ignoramous wrote:
| There is more
|
| > _In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread
| through aerosols, at least in mice, which "may warrant re-
| thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and
| diagnostic laboratories," they wrote. Aguzzi says he was
| "totally shocked" by the finding and introduced safety measures
| to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew
| little attention elsewhere._
|
| ...
|
| > _The government inspectors ' report concluded that Jaumain's
| accident was not unique, however. There had been at least 17
| accidents among the 100 or so scientists and technicians in
| France working with prions in the previous decade, five of whom
| stabbed or cut themselves with contaminated syringes or blades.
| Another technician at the same lab had a fingerprick accident
| with prions in 2005, but has not developed vCJD symptoms so
| far, Bensimhon says._
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| I feel for Emilie. Those must have been tough years.
| yarg wrote:
| Time to develop protocols with slice resistant gloves.
| fsloth wrote:
| Could a cure be to stop proteosynthesis of the prion-protein?
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-ar...
|
| "This protein, in its healthy, properly-folded state, is, if not
| trivial, relatively unimportant. Its complete loss is certainly
| not catastrophic."
|
| I have no idea how to block proteosynthesis of a single protein
| in humans, maybe more biologically attuned HN:ners can comment
| what it would mean (I'm totally clueless of cellular biology).
| nlitened wrote:
| > "This protein, in its healthy, properly-folded state, is, if
| not trivial, relatively unimportant. Its complete loss is
| certainly not catastrophic."
|
| If I at my age know anything about how real world works,
| absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence, and I can
| bet that this will turn out to be complete bullshit, and it
| will get known in the future that this protein is important.
| jhgb wrote:
| It seems to me that in an adult, it may already be too late.
| How would you remove the existing protein?
| subroutine wrote:
| Proteins have a half life of ~24 hours. CJD has an incubation
| period of roughly 10 years. If de novo PrP synthesis was
| somehow halted, the likelihood of developing CJD would drop
| to zero.
|
| On the other hand whatever job PrP was doing will also cease
| getting done, and its downstream pathways will be disrupted.
| So there are likely consequences.
|
| Now if you could totally shut down PrP synthesis for like a
| week, then turn it back on, that might work. In theory this
| is possible using a tet-expression system [1], but I've never
| worked with a tet system that wasn't leaky. The only sure way
| would be to KO PrP genes from all cells, then CRISPR it back
| in a week later. Oh, and I'm talking about cells in a culture
| dish; this strategy would never work in an adult human.
|
| [1] https://www.jax.org/news-and-
| insights/2015/april/introductio...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Maybe it would degrade after some time, or be cleaned up by
| the body. At worst it should stop the disease progression.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Apparently some humans are running a patch that fixes this prion
| bug. How do we get this merged into mainline?
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17725
| newsbinator wrote:
| That's a great question. I would really love an answer.
|
| > CRISPR-Cas9-Based Knockout of the Prion Protein and Its
| Effect on the Proteome
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| neolog wrote:
| That's a nice mechanism but wouldn't we all have to rebase
| from lucy?
| galactus wrote:
| We sterilize everyone but them?
| dmix wrote:
| This reminds me of those early 1900s nuclear researchers who got
| exposed to radiation poisoning which eventually took a long term
| toll.
|
| The multi-year gap makes this one especially difficult to track
| down to specific events/exposures.
| natmaka wrote:
| The 'Radium Girls' cases!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
|
| "It is safe"...
| wil421 wrote:
| Kinda a morbid question but could you just sever the finger
| moments after the prick? Or would the blood pump so fast that the
| prion(s) is already in your body.
| carlmr wrote:
| Just don't use the same saw.
| hammock wrote:
| At the very least a tourniquet could be considered. It only
| takes one protein to get through though.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| My housemate is an organic chemist and from a past conversation
| apparently there is a cautionary paper regarding a grad student
| who lost a hand due to delayed amputation of a finger after
| similarly being jabbed with some nasty chemical. Can't find the
| paper unfortunately.
| connorproctor wrote:
| They mention in the article that normal protocol is to
| immediately soak the thumb in bleach. Not sure if that's
| actually effective though, or just hopeful.
| JoeCoo7 wrote:
| Not sure why she wasn't wearing the proper protection or
| responded to the exposure correctly (bleach rinse apparently) but
| this goes to show the importance of following lab safety
| protocols at all times.
| Splendor wrote:
| > "She had not been trained in handling dangerous prions or
| responding to accidents and did not wear both metal mesh and
| surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien Bensimhon,
| the family's lawyer."
| brohoolio wrote:
| My heart breaks for these families. I can't help but wonder if
| the labs are taking the necessary precautions in terms of prion
| disposal.
|
| I can't imagine the prions are allowed down the drain....
| briantakita wrote:
| These mad scientists need to be stopped. How about all research
| into gain of function, genetic engineering viruses, prions, etc.
| need to have a moratorium. There is too much risk & not enough
| transparency on all levels.
|
| We don't hear about all of the problems. I wonder what else is
| wrong and what happened. Whistleblowers need protection, not
| punishment.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Look up how fluorine, the "devil's chemical", was found and
| isolated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine#Isolation They
| blew themselves up, or worse, in pursuit of scientific
| knowledge. Without their work, semiconductors and electronics
| wouldn't be possible, and we wouldn't be here on this forum.
|
| You don't have to sacrifice yourself, but don't infringe on
| those brave folks who are advancing our scientific knowledge by
| risking their lives. (Although if you're a lab-leak
| conspiracist, then it's probably too late.)
| Reventlov wrote:
| From Wikipedia [1]:
|
| << _Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit
| their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein.
| They characterize several atal and transmissible neuro
| degenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not
| known what causes the normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal
| three-dimensional structure is suspected of conferring infectious
| properties, collapsing nearby protein molecules into the same
| shape. [...] There are no effective treatments for prion
| diseases._ >>
|
| Basically, you get infected, you die. See also [2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
|
| [2]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/prions-
| ar...
| bb123 wrote:
| Well we don't really know that, because diagnosis is normally
| confirmed post-mortem. There could be many people walking
| around infected with prions that show no symptoms at all.
| curryst wrote:
| There's some pedantry here.
|
| There is evidence that some people have a mutation that
| prevents them from getting CJD. The mutation causes a small
| change in the proteins that CJD prions impact (changing a
| glycine to valine at a certain part of the protein). The
| working theory is that that structural change prevents CJD
| prions from being able to re-form healthy proteins,
| preventing the spread of the disease. I wouldn't be at all
| surprised if those proteins are eventually broken down by the
| body and removed.
|
| All that being said, I don't know if you would even consider
| it an "infection" if the person is immune to the prions
| spreading. Prions aren't generally transmissible, so if the
| prions don't do anything and can't be transmitted... is
| anything actually wrong? You and I are exposed to tons of
| bacteria every day, but as long as your body can fight it off
| (i.e. no symptoms and no transmission), we wouldn't usually
| call that an "infection". In the same light, presence of
| abnormal proteins that aren't causing an issue doesn't seem
| like something we would call an "infection".
|
| There's also the fact that some people inherit the disease
| (as in their body actually makes the prions itself), which
| doesn't make any sense in the context of an "infection". It's
| their own body producing the prions, so in those cases it's a
| genetic disease, not an infection.
| [deleted]
| rs999gti wrote:
| > Basically, you get infected, you die.
|
| Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...
| Johnny555 wrote:
| And avoid being in the same room with someone that's been
| infected:
|
| _In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread
| through aerosols_
| hammock wrote:
| >Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine.
|
| And animal brains, and the areas around experimental research
| labs...
| [deleted]
| Marsymars wrote:
| Also see dura mater grafts:
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6709a3.htm
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Avoid eating British beef in the 1980s/1990s, too.
|
| Apparently 1 in 2,000 people in the UK may be infected.[0]
|
| We still don't know if there's going to be a second wave of
| disease from infections from that time period due to genetic
| factors influencing incubation of the disease.
|
| This is why people who were in the UK for longer than a few
| months during the 80s and 90s aren't allowed to give blood in
| various places around the world.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24525584
| anthk wrote:
| I was there with the mad cow disease. Not in the UK, but in
| Spain, as commerce inside the EU made people truly paranoid
| on eating meat from "untrusted" sources.
|
| Scary, really scary.
| croes wrote:
| And don't feed beef to cows.
| [deleted]
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| Serious question should I be avoiding traveling to the UK
| over this??
| hef19898 wrote:
| No, that was 20-30 years ago.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| At this point, the best prevention is to avoid eating
| anyone who lived in Britain 20-30 years ago
| hef19898 wrote:
| Hopefully that's something we can all agree upon!
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| You forgot anyone who ate anyone who lived in Britain
| 20-30 years ago.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Nope, but do avoid eating any British people over the age
| of 20.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| The mediation HCG is processed from pregnant women's urine
| and has been shown to potentially contain prions. I took it
| for years. Yay.
|
| The sad thing is there's a recombinant version that would be
| safe, but it also costs thousands of dollars.
| imglorp wrote:
| > She had not been trained in handling dangerous prions or
| responding to accidents and did not wear both metal mesh and
| surgical gloves, as she was supposed to, says Julien Bensimhon,
| the family's lawyer. The thumb should have been soaked in a
| bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, Bensimhon
| adds.
|
| Does bleach even affect proteins? Isn't that protocol for an
| organism you're afraid of?
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| yes, bleach kills microorganisms by denaturing their proteins.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And by oxidizing everything else. It's not denaturation
| that's making my clothes white again.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Hypochlorous acid denatures proteins, so yeah.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| But wasn't there an issue before of prion contamination with
| surgical instruments used in ophtalmic surgery.
|
| I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed at
| some ridiculous pH value, no?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed
| at some ridiculous pH value, no?
|
| Probably not until they had reason to do so.
|
| "Hot acidic environment" is hell when it comes to corrosion
| and the engineering incentive for medical stuff is only to
| be as corrosion resistant as you need because there are
| other design considerations and the most corrosion
| resistant stainless steels are not the bet fit for building
| a super precise needle you're gonna poke around in
| someone's eye so you wind up wanting to pick a middle
| ground alloy. Picking a middle ground alloy puts a hard
| limit on what you can do to clean your instruments before
| you degrade them in unacceptably short order.
|
| I don't know how things have changed since. My medical
| manufacturing experience is out of date and limited.
| persedes wrote:
| yeah I wouldn't count on prions being as easily denatured
| as other proteins. E.g. mad cow disease spread because
| prions are not killed by simply cooking / boiling it.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Is there some specific reason to think that prions are
| harder to denature than other proteins? It seems like mad
| cow disease could also spread simply because meat is not
| normally cooked to ensure that 100% of the proteins in it
| are denatured.
| nebopolis wrote:
| Prions are essentially already denatured/unfolded. They
| are a more stable state of a normal protein that has
| biological function, and they interact with the
| "correctly" folded proteins to cause them to denature
| into additional prions. Often denaturing a prion means
| actually breaking apart the protein into fragments or
| amino acids, because it is already at the most
| stable/denatured state. This is also why they are so
| persistent in nature and so hard to remove from surfaces.
| Apparently gas plasma sterilization is a promising
| possibility. (this seems like an ok overview of the
| challenges: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21271212/).
| Current procedures include things like autoclaving in
| 121C sodium hydroxide for 30 minutes. Definitely not
| something that fully cooking will inactivate.
| persedes wrote:
| In addition prions seem to contain disulfide bonds, which
| tend to make proteins even more stable. (RNAse for
| example has them and is notoriously hard to get rid off
| unless you treat it with essentially H2S).
|
| I haven't found a source for that, but according to my
| bio teacher mad cow disease started, because they decided
| to lower the temperature to pretreat animal waste (such
| as bones and brain matter...) which then ended up in what
| cows get fed with. Wikipedia mentioned nowadays they
| simply leave out the bones and brain from the food.
| tedivm wrote:
| Yeah, bleach does affect prions. Most of the studies I could
| find were tested on metal, not just someone's thumb. It looks
| bleach doesn't do a great job of penetrating tissue so the hope
| is to destroy the prions before they get into the cut, which
| seems more hopeful than effective to me.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Does bleach even affect proteins? Isn't that protocol for an
| organism you're afraid of?
|
| Yes, bleach's direct action is attacking proteins:
|
| https://phys.org/news/2008-11-household-bacteria.html
| COGlory wrote:
| >A 5-minute soak in a 40% solution of household bleach
| decontaminated stainless steel wires coated with chronic
| wasting disease (CWD) prions, according to a new study by
| National Institutes of Health scientists.
|
| https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...
| quenix wrote:
| Holy shit, 5 minutes _soaked_? That 's intense
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| I was thinking what if she amputated her thumb immediately? It
| seems like an extreme reaction, but could it have prevented her
| infection and death?
| subroutine wrote:
| That'd be a bold move, considering (1) it may not have
| helped, and (2) it is possible the thumb incident wasn't how
| she got infected. It's possible she got infected some other
| random day in the lab. Maybe she rubbed her eye while wearing
| a contaminated glove, or breathed in brain flecks through a
| poor fitting N95, while slicing a particularly dry
| cryosample.
| [deleted]
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Good luck getting _that_ research commissioned!
|
| Interesting idea though, and really it'd be a pretty sensible
| trade-off.
| ta988 wrote:
| Yes it does destroy them efficiently, it unfolds them (so no
| more prion effect) and also aggregate them so they can't
| circulate.
| chrbarrol wrote:
| Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon?
| It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a
| close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years
| after the contamination started.
|
| Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which
| causes Kuru [1] for example.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
| Omavel wrote:
| bio-terrorism is not effective.
| tyingq wrote:
| What's "effective" mean in this context? The anthrax letters
| in the US in 2001 certainly dominated news cycles.
| ekianjo wrote:
| And killed very few people. That's what we call terrorism
| (lots of news coverage for very few deaths) - it's not
| effective in doing anything but news cycles.
| triceratops wrote:
| "Terror" is the point of "terrorism". It's in the word.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Point of terrorism is achieving a political change
| through terror. Terror is not the end in itself.
|
| From this point of view, mailing of anthrax in 2001 was
| very inefficient.
| jessaustin wrote:
| We need to expand the set of possible actors and goals.
| The anthrax campaign happened immediately after 9/11. The
| result of the campaign was the end of effective political
| opposition to the massive expansion of military and
| "secret" aspects of the USA government made possible by
| 9/11. _Cui bono?_ Certainly not the several implausible
| patsies the authorities immediately had lined up to
| blame.
|
| Numerous USA calamities make a lot more sense when we
| study them with an eye toward who benefits rather than
| who is blamed.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Terror only propagates through mass media. Mass media is
| the issue.
| PKop wrote:
| Given that an attack of this sort _would_ be propagated
| through mass media, then the claim that the attack would
| be ineffective is wrong.
| emptyfile wrote:
| >it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles.
|
| That's literally the desired effect. What you're thiking
| of is war.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I was referring to the original comment above:
|
| > It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions
|
| Its not the right way to infect millions of people. It
| does not scale. Therefore not effective.
| tyingq wrote:
| 5 envelopes, 5 dead, 17 more infected.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| The most effective bioterror attack in the USA was https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... and
| it killed zero people, affecting 751 people in total.
| Bioterror is expensive and difficult.
|
| For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a
| good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins,
| and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a
| protective environment. Spray them onto crops? Crops and
| soil are covered in small bugs and microbes which break
| down anything too long, including proteins and carbohydrate
| chains. No, in order to have prions in the food supply, you
| need something like cannabalistic cow-raising practices or
| other ways of recycling prions in a wet+hot safe
| environment.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| So you just inject them into the food supply?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Can't you just spray them into a hamburger meat grinder
| at a meat packing plant to protect the prions in beef?
| But it'd be a pretty ineffective terror attack if it
| takes 10 years for people to show symptoms... though that
| could also mean that attack was already made 5 years ago
| and we just don't know yet.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a
| good thing overall for us) is that they're naked
| proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when
| outside of a protective environment.
|
| How does this jive with the seemingly extreme difficulty
| of effective sterilization of prion-contaminated objects?
|
| https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/32/9/1348/291736
| nabla9 wrote:
| Terrorism that is effective is usually called warfare,
| genocide or something else.
| natmaka wrote:
| Indeed. http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-
| was-wrong/
| ekianjo wrote:
| if you want to kill lots people thats pretty much the worst way
| of doing it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The definition of terrorism is "inciting fear", not
| necessarily "kill thousands". A million people afraid if they
| caught BSE/cow madness is _definitely_ hitting that
| definition, especially as the stuff can 't be tested for...
| people exposed to prions will have that sword hanging over
| their neck for the rest of their lives, and the affected area
| will be out of order for _years_.
|
| To this day, many countries ban all people who lived in the
| UK between 1980-1996 from donating blood
| (https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/bse-nachwirkungen-blut-
| spend...) simply because of that fear.
| overlordalex wrote:
| I've always thought a _very_ effective strategy would be to get
| a crop-duster and spray a prion-contaminated mist over a major
| city, basically contaminating every public surface in a large
| area
|
| I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards -
| do you remove the surface of everything in your city?
|
| To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill
| a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale, think about the
| terrorism aspect - imagine not being able to interact with any
| surface? It would be like a permanent covid lockdown on the
| area
|
| The psychological effect of a large-scale area-denial would be
| massive
| dnautics wrote:
| It's not really effective because it takes years to manifest
| symptoms of prion disease. Terrorism usually has a message
| attached to it, and "you're gonna start dying in 10 years" is
| not conducive to messaging.
| chrbarrol wrote:
| It is true that hiding it for many years would make it less
| attractive for terrorists, however one could imagine
| another strategy where you wait 12 months before
| anonymously telling the authorities you did it, without
| telling them how. (While threatening to do it again)
|
| Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases
| around that cannot be detected until way after it happens
| would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You
| could probably keep the attack going for at least a year
| before authorities get their act together, all the while
| people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to
| know how the original group got infected a year earlier if
| you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even
| mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination
| even if the specific product is found)
| XorNot wrote:
| Authorities are really good at de-anonymizing anonymous
| messengers. Who have no incentive to spread an unverified
| rumor they can't prove.
| medstrom wrote:
| In this case I guess the message targets people in other
| cities than the doomed one. "This could happen to your city
| too".
| dnautics wrote:
| you'd still have to wait a decade after the first attack
| to make threats on the second city.
| medstrom wrote:
| I think reading about prions is the scary part, no need
| to wait for the deaths.
| dnautics wrote:
| feel free to experiment with terrorism establishing
| credibility using a different psychological model. I,
| personally, won't.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Why even bother with terrorism? It sounds like a
| potentially gruesome and sadistic weapon with which to
| use against a particularly bitter foe- the terror is only
| incidental. Maybe it's akin to using a dirty bomb.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Wouldn't an entire city being sprayed with prions be a
| fairly apocalyptic event in and of itself? Those prions
| aren't going to go away, they'll get blown about and
| distributed by the millions of cars, buses, and trains
| going in and out of the city. What can you realistically
| do about that, go full Imperial Inquisition and raze the
| entire section of the country to the ground?
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| living with knowing that i probably have 10 yrs before die
| in a gruesom neurodegeneration, knowing that if i interact
| much with our world that maybe i spread this to others,
| seriously terrifying, depressing, would induce misery.
| dnautics wrote:
| I'm not disputing that. (also, prions aren't really
| human-to-human contagious, unless you're into eating your
| friends' brains or swapping syringes)
| dekhn wrote:
| Prions are weird. I was at UCSF during the time they went from a
| fringe theory to an established fact and a nobel prize. The
| professor who studied them (Prusiner) had to overcome tons of
| resistance and the experiments were heroic (often waiting months
| for mice to die). It's really funny that everybody resisted it
| until somebody mentioned that there was a plausible physical
| mechanism of refolding catalysis.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Makes complete sense that there was resistance until a viable
| mechanism was proposed. Otherwise it just sounds like voodoo.
| boxed wrote:
| Not really. Look at how Darwins theory of evolution was
| published in 1859, while the mechanism wasn't really clear
| until at earliest 1928, and in some ways it's still not fully
| understood.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, because the underlying data demonstrated that there was a
| statistically significant death effect occurring, with a wide
| range of evidence implicating prions, before there was a
| mechanism. You shouldn't require a plausible mechanism to
| trust your experiments (seen this a hundred times, like in
| RNA enzymes, heart of the ribosome, various dna-is-the-
| heritable-agent experimetns).
| XorNot wrote:
| Yes you should: because all you have otherwise is a death
| rate that could be caused by any number of things.
| Biological organisms die all the time for all sorts of
| reasons: there's a difference between showing a series of
| factors lead to an death rate, and proposing the specific
| mechanism by which that happens _and it 's important_.
|
| That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove
| there was an aether through which it propagated, and not
| finding it up-ended physics.
| dekhn wrote:
| Not only did they know the death rate, they had an
| infectious agent in a tube they knew was protein. If you
| identify a reproducible agent you can study in the lab,
| you don't need any plausible mechanism.
|
| Note that aether _was_ the plausible mechanism, and it
| mislead people for a long time. The experiment that
| "disproved" aether just showed that the mechanistic
| proposal was simple, and wrong.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Clearly you do not need to know the mechanism by which
| light waves propagate to prove that light waves do
| propagate. It would be ass-backwards to wait until
| special relativity was formulated to accept the existence
| of electromagnetic waves.
| ricksunny wrote:
| If ancient Romans could have shown correlation & causation
| between lead pipes & drinking vessels to poor health
| outcomes, they should have ceased using lead for these
| purposes even while lacking the capability of understanding
| the underlying mechanism. There's no voodoo in that.
| contravariant wrote:
| It's not exactly that rare for a phase transition out of a
| metastable state to happen spontaneously when given an
| appropriate nucleation seed.
| dmix wrote:
| This bit in the article drove home how difficult it would be:
|
| > The two types of CJD can only be distinguished through a
| postmortem examination of brain tissue.
| varispeed wrote:
| Is it because many researchers put their ego first over the
| science? It's so many times that they ridicule ideas, that
| often amounts to bullying and then they rarely even say sorry
| when it turns out they were wrong. Why won't academia flush out
| these types of people? The toxic atmosphere with no way of
| getting rid of bad apples is what put me off from studying.
| raincom wrote:
| This phenomenon is studied in the history and philosophy of
| sciences; it is called "paradigm change" ala Thomas Kuhn.
| Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie
| their psychological identities with the paradigm they are
| working on. So, this resistance is expected.
|
| 'How to overcome resistance' is studied in Sociology of
| Science.
| dekhn wrote:
| it's nuanced. prusiner himself was a bully who ran a toxic
| lab. my group collaborated with him and we got an eyeful.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| >Why won't academia flush out these types of people?
|
| Because this behavior is part of human nature. Do you think
| scientists as a class are are somehow exempt from this, say,
| by some form of rationalistic purity?
| Swizec wrote:
| It's because discovering something completely new and unheard
| of that isn't even hinted at hy any existing theory is
| extremely rare. Most people with such claims turn out to be
| wrong, doing bad experiments, fudging data, or worse.
|
| The scientific community is resistent to such things because
| 90% of the time they are right to be resistant, the
| hypothesis is conclusively disproven, and we never hear about
| it again.
|
| Sometimes, rarely, the claim comes through, survives the
| scrutiny, and scientists quickly change their minds based on
| new established fact.
|
| Imagine if someone came out with "I have found a way to run
| 50 compute cycles per CPU instruction!!". We would
| justifiably ridicule that person's idea as implausible or
| impossible. It would take a lot of evidence to change the
| whole computer industry's opinion on what's possible.
| agumonkey wrote:
| any article about the replication mecanism ? not too short, not
| too detailed (if possible) thanks
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-28 19:01 UTC)