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Fuck prions and the horse they rode in on. They're not even alive, so you can't kill them. No vaccine, no cure, and thoroughly cooking your food is still no guaranteed way to get rid of them.
Nature's silent assassins, and they take their sweet time doing it too. By the time you first notice it's already far too late.
Wdym too late? Is there something you could have done if you knew "soon enough"?
I say this without any attempt at humor, "kill yourself peacefully before you're unable to and the people around you refuse to"
If I knew I had a prion disease, I'd be making plans to die peacefully unaware, or suddenly, the moment a symptom shows up.
My only real firsthand experience with prion diseases is Fatal Familial Insomnia, and the person was strapped into hospital bed restraints after a suicide attempt, and the only thing they would do when they chose to speak was beg for us to let them die because they can't keep going like this anymore.
Edit: honestly I do not know if there is any way to treat other prions, but to my knowledge there isn't. It's just "ease their suffering as they slowly die in front of you"
Same with receiving a fatal dose of radiation poisoning.
People will want to study you. Do yourself a favour and immediately kill yourself via a guaranteed method.
Tell everyone else not to try the lasagna?
Fuckal
"you can't kill them" And as an American, I took that personally
So anyways, I started blasting
Prion vaccines would work for sure. Their rarity makes it not all that worthwhile as a public health measure
How do you vaccinate against a protein?
Prion diseases are fatal infectious neurodegenerative disorders and prototypic conformational diseases, caused by the conformational conversion of the normal cellular prion protein (PrPC) into the pathological PrPSc isoform.
The immune system does not develop a bona fide immune response against prion infection, as PrPC and PrPSc share an identical protein primary structure, and prions seem not to represent a trigger for immune responses. This asks for alternative vaccine strategies, which focus on PrPC-directed self-antibodies or exposure of disease-specific structures and epitopes. Several groups have established a proof-of-concept that such vaccine candidates can induce some levels of protective immunity in cervid and rodent models without inducing unwanted side effects. This review will highlight the most recent developments and discuss progress and challenges remaining.
Have a read through the full article and sources below and you can take a look at some novel approaches being evaluated at the moment:
I'm so excited to finally be able to safely consume the brains of my enemies!
Well, viruses aren't alive either. I would say they are very similar to Prions in the aspect, that it is just a rogue biological building block, able to get itself reproduced, to the dismay of the body.
Also there is no reason, why you couldn't develop vaccines against Prions. It could be even simpler, because they have to be shaped very specifically to cause the harm they do, and it should be easy to break that specific shape with something attaching to it.
At least virus have different genetic code which suggest they are different something. Prion is just normal protein gone rogue.
Prions are gone rogue, by being shaped a different way. They are uniquely different from their original protein. At the end of the day Viruses are also just normal DNA that went rogue and changed over time. The difference is that viruses can spread and mutate much more easily, so they could adapt under evolutionary mechanisms.
Viruses at least have DNA though. Prions are far, far simpler by comparison.
By the time you first notice it’s already far too late.
Not really, so long as you have already reproduced. From the perspective of your genes, "you" are expendable anyway:-(.
And if we want to do anything about that, perhaps we should properly fund scientific research.
Unless you're infertile, from the perspective of your genes, it's still too early.
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if you are infertile, then early or late does not matter
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either way, the individual "you" does not matter to evolution that works on a population basis (not strictly speaking fully true bc of e.g. bottlenecks, like Mitochondrial Eve, Y-chromosomal Adam, and Genghis Khan, but the idea of "population" can be extended to include such founder effects). i.e. your genetic makeup is determined by millions of years of prior evolution, not what you had for breakfast this morning, so regardless of current fertility status, events such as Alzheimer's are "okay" (again, caveat: purely in the evolutionary sense - though it is horrifying to an individual who gets it) bc they occur post reproductive age, i.e. it is too late bc the genes have already been passed on to another generation.
Insert additional caveats to literally all of this, and also caveats to those caveats, bc biology cares little for how easily it can be understood:-D. e.g. kin selection is also a thing, long past reproductive age and also works for infertile people.
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