Originally published at: Canada investigating a cluster of 42 cases of a mad cow-like brain disease | Boing Boing
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Not Creutzfeldt-jakob, then?
Anyone round there been eating squirrel brains?
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Prions occur naturally and can be found in plants as well as the meat of various animals. The geographic limitation of those infected is probably providing some research data.
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“notes the existence of a cluster of 42 cases of a progressive neurological syndrome of unknown origin.”
Whoa, 42 cases is alarming.
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From CBC:
No link?
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And almost certainly a massive undercount. The true impact of the outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK in the 90s went undetected for a long time, because it’s hard to diagnose until after someone dies, and even then only by slicing into the brain, which isn’t a routine analysis in post mortems.
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what!?! is that really true? i thought prion diseases came only from misfolds in animal proteins
( and usually transmitted in cows by feeding ground up cows to cows, and from there to people. )
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If it is a prion disease, that’s a problem until the source is identified. Of course, they don’t say it is, that is an assumption based on the comparison to Mad Cow Disease. There is a pretty readily identifiable pathological appearance to the brain tissue on autopsy for those illnesses, so I would hope they would at least be able to confirm the class of illness. There are so many possible sources already identified. Scrappie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, even Kuru in humans (hopefully, there are no cannibal cultures hiding out there), probably more I am not familiar with. Nasty things.
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Usually animals, but not always. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4896674/
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TIL!
Plant protein behaves like a prion : Nature News & Comment
Are there prions in plants? (nih.gov)
Shit!
Ack! Ninja’d by @moortaktheundea
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okay, but neither of those point to the idea that either yeasts or plants can transmit their prion-like protein folding memory to humans as a prion based brain disease.
( gatto goes back to eating veggies in peace )
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I would hope if that were a possibility it would have become apparent long ago. There is a much wider evolutionary gap to jump between Arabidopsis and Homo than between relatively closely related mammal species. I am just amazed that I had not run across this tidbit before!
(The Shit! response was more “Wow! That s a bit of info I should have known!” rather than “I guess the world is gonna end now.”)
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i’ll give you my b vitamin fortified nutritional yeast when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands… said nobody ever because it’s much easier just to share.
i can see the idea that:
might be misconstrued by people. when actually the meat industry can protect people from prion diseases by not feeding animals to animals that would otherwise only graze grass.
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This is very largely true, although not entirely, unless deer have become carnivorous when no one was looking. Chronic Wasting Disease is a real problem here, and I don’t think anybody is feeding the deer herds on cow brains or anything. And I am not so sure about Scrappie in sheep. BSE is certainly associated with weird feeding practices like that, and Kuru is exclusively associated with cannibalistic funerary rituals, but I don’t think that covers it all.
And then there are the squirrels. Just can’t trust them!
Man Dies from Extremely Rare Disease After Eating Squirrel Brains | Live Science
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As a north-of-the-border-ian, let me pre-empt this next global epidemic with the following statement:
Sorry, eh.
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Only sometimes. Researchers Document Deer Eating Birds | Field & Stream
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Hm. (Thinks back to some evenings in Moncton.) Probably not.
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Probably not… How very reassuring…
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