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.
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"
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.
Fucking prions, man. Scarier than most diseases. Remember kids: in a survival situation it's okay to eat most of a Long Pig or a cow but don't eat the brain. You just never know.
Imagine a fundamental building block of life as a gear. Now imagine your brain as a clockwork clock. Now take the diseased prion gear and throw it into your clockwork mind.
Suddenly, that mismatched gear smashes into the other gears.
This strips the gears and makes them like the foreign gear and now your mind no longer keeps track of time and many other things.
If i remember right a simplified explanation would be: A protein is a long chain of amino-acids that folds into a specific structure to achieve a certain task(for example stuff like cut a certain bond in a certain molecule). Prion is the exact same chain of amino-acids but it has folded in a wrong configuration thus cannot complete the original function, and even worse it can refold other proteins with the same amino-acid chain to the prion configuration slowly spreading through the body infecting more and more proteins ultimately depriving the body of the ability to do a specific fuction
Pls someone correct me if im wrong because my source is a vague memory of likely a video i dont remember possibly years ago.