The paper makes it clear that the analysis of the prions showed it was iatrogenic (meaning it was caused by a medical treatment) and not something that she acquired by some other pathway such as eating meat or brain from an infected animal).

Alzheimer’s isn’t a prion disease, but it does show prion-like behavior. Misfolded proteins like amyloid-beta and tau can spread within the brain similarly to prions, but unlike true prion diseases (e.g. CJD), Alzheimer’s isn’t infectious and isn’t caused by prions. It's a distinct neurodegenerative disorder with overlapping mechanisms, not classification.

Yeah, they are the only diseases I really fear. There are few situations where a single molecule is enough to fuck up your entire brain in a way it can't even detect, and certainly not fight against.

Don't eat animal brains. (And while we're at it: be cautious about livers, since some contain toxic levels of vitamin A...)

That doesn’t seem very likely from my reading. It sounds like it’s not unheard of for prion-diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob to take a while to destroy a person. The poor lady fta apparently had a genetic component that contributed to the latency. Brutal. Inducing dormancy in this and similar cases would effectively present a treatment, if not a cure, to an hereto untreatable, uncurable disease.

> … the woman first visited doctors with tremors and trouble balancing. As is often the case, once symptoms started, her condition rapidly worsened. She was hospitalized … and several days into her stay, she fell into a coma that she would never awaken from.

In other news, apparently hgh used to be extracted from cadavers. Wtlf.

I happened to pick up How the Cows Turned Mad by Maxine Schwartz a couple weeks ago. I'm not finished with it yet, but in the section about Kuru there was a comment about how cases happened at least 4 decades after the cannibalism ended. I picked it up just to flip through but it is a pretty engrossing history of the various forms of prions disease.

Not much happened to people but mad cow(prion diseases in general) completely changed US beef/cattle production.

For example, it used to be common practice to feed dead cattle to the remaining cattle. That changed. Some ranchers still do it, though. We also changed the breeding programs and import/export. A lot of countries, because of prion diseases, basically stopped importing US beef.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/us/mad-cow-forces-beef-in...

The US is also dealing with a chronic wasting disease issue in deer and other wild animals right now. It's one of those "about to explode" problems.

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cervid/...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10892334/

> I realized then that we wouldn't know for decades how many humans caught it.

Considering that the 90s is about 20 years ago, the timeline seems to match up given the social climate today.

Considering how hard it has been to clense against prions, this is very encouraging. I find it interesting that we struggle to decontaminate materials because of their resistance, but we might be able to train the body to deal with them.

I thought the time limit in Australia expired recently (as in: within the last two to three years).

As of July 25, 2022, the Australian blood donation rules that previously barred individuals who lived in the UK for more than six months between 1980 and 1996 from donating blood have been lifted.

Maybe worth double checking at your local blood donor centre. There always seems to be a shortage of blood.

You have one misfolded protein that “teaches” other proteins to misfold in the same way[1]. It’s very slow initially because you’re talking about individual proteins, and it takes a while for each prion to bump into a normal protein of the correct type. The immune system can’t do anything about them though, so once a protein is converted there’s permanently another prion. The conversion rate is very slow, but it never ever ratchets back - the number only increases. It’s a geometric progression.

Once symptoms show up there’s a TON of them, and it goes downhill fairly quickly. That’s why there’s such a long latency period.

[1]It’s like Ice-9, if you’ve read Cat’s Cradle.