• vexikron@lemmy.zip
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    If a mad-cow-like disease jumped the barrier to humans and began spreading through Americans, the main problem in eradicating it would be that basically no one would be able to tell the difference from the average ‘Enthusiastic’ Republican Voter and someone whose brain is melting due to an actual pathogen.

      • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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        We’re actually not sure about that. Some prions do spread by eating the meat of infected animals, but I think we can be pretty sure that’s not what’s happening in a wild deer population. Prions can also be found in the environment, including deposited on grasses and plants, where that can last a very long time.

        We do not know if this disease is or will become communicable to predator animals or what the potential is for environmental spread to livestock. We do know a bit more about the BSE than some others, but there’s a bunch we know exist that we know little to nothing about, and it’s guaranteed there’s more out there that we haven’t encountered yet.

          • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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            Occasionally they do consume meat as far as I know (as several herbivores do), but if that were a serious candidate it would be among the principle lines of transmission being investigated.

            Zoonotic diseases are investigated by cross-disciplinary teams with experience ranging from public health and disease experts to wildlife biologists and ecologists. I did some work on a similar topic with the National Parks Service so I know a bit about how these are approached. I have no involvement with this and I’ve never worked on prion contagion models - like I said, we just don’t know. But I do have experience in the area.

            Prions have been found in soil, on grass and plants, and do not get quickly degraded by sun and rain. We do know that this disease is density dependent, so you’d need a model of deer going carnivore and cannibal in a density dependent natural model, which is not a phenomenon I’m familiar with.

            So what I’m saying is that we just don’t know what the deer-deer vector is or if a predation vector exists as a secondary transmission or if one will appear.

            • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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              Cool information thanks. Yeah wasn’t trying to say that that’s definitely how it’s spread but most people don’t know that they’re opportunistic carnivores!

        • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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          The problem is that the brain is the part you want to splatter all over the Italian marble floors of their mansions.

          New plan live butchering so that the brain and spine is still intact and no need to worry about Mad Bougie disease.

    • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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      I don’t think enough people are eating venison regularly for a this prion to be a serious threat even if it manages to transmit to humans

      • vexikron@lemmy.zip
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        Have you seen zombie movies? It only takes ONE unassuming hunter… and then it immediately mutates into blah blah magic nonsense ensues…

        and then it is airborne, and bloodborne

        You are correct of course. =P

      • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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        Deer arent eating venison regularly enough to explain the rate of its spread among deer.

        Its moving through them someplace else. Which means if it jumps to us, its moving through us someplace else too. And we dont actually know for sure how its moving through them.

      • Fondots@lemmy.world
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        It probably depends on where you are, different parts of the country and different social circles have more or less hunters and different hunting cultures.

        I know that around me in the circles I run in I pretty much everyone I know either hunts or has a friend (or multiple friends) who does and can/will hook them up with venison now and then.

        If you have a couple hunters in a family, they fill all of their tags, are generous about sharing their venison with family and friends, if they’re unlucky enough that those deer have CWD, then that could potentially be dozens of people exposed.

        • Kilnier@lemmy.ca
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          The mill I work at schedules their yearly maintenance around hunting season. First week both mills are down. Second week half and half.

          Easy 80% of staff are gone hunting.

        • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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          I say this as someone who regularly eats venison and lives in a place where it’s relatively common as well but it still isn’t nearly as threatening as something like mad cow. Pretty much everyone eats beef.

          It’s a lot easier to tell people don’t eat venison you hunted and contain it than it is halt the entire beef industry and tag everyone who may have eaten it yk?

          I’m not saying it wouldn’t be bad, only that we’ve been through much worse as far as prions go and one like this would be relatively speaking, less of a threat

  • Don Escobar@lemmy.world
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    From the little I’ve read on this it appears that the infectious cells favor a functional brain so that means all maga evangelical republicans are safe.

  • Chocrates@lemmy.world
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    Without reading, is it Chronic wasting? I just checked in on that the other day and the CDC didn’t seem to think it was a big deal unless you are in a hotzone.

    • Buffaloaf@lemmy.world
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      Yeah. CWD a big problem but it isn’t going to cause a zombie apocalypse like the headline implies.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        Prion diseases can take decades to show symptoms, like with CJD, and are very hard to test for in humans.

        It might not be a question of whether it can jump species barriers, but when we will know it did, which is why the CDC can’t and won’t ring any alarm bells, just advise caution, until it’s either too late for individuals or a confirmed non-issue.

        There was a study that claimed it had jumped to chimps/monkeys in a testing environment but last I heard it was disputed, but that still leaves the average citizen with plenty of reason to not

        Checks notes

        Eat a diseased animal.

        Source your venison, it should be tested if it’s from an affected area but you never can trust suppliers for wild game.

        Consider just eating, you know, cow, or only venison from a trusted source.

        Preferably the person that shot and had it butchered.

  • CobblerScholar@lemmy.world
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    Oh its totally fine it’s not like we’ve made the planet warmer allowing viruses to mutilate easier and for longer or like how we haven’t been taking part in a centuries long destruction of the deers native habitat forcing them into populated areas right?.. Right?

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        I mean, doesn’t that reinforce their point, since many other pathogens are even more touchy on heat?

        • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
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          It’s actually worse than a virus.

          Once an environment is infected, the pathogen is extremely hard to eradicate. It can persist for years in dirt or on surfaces, and scientists report it is resistant to disinfectants, formaldehyde, radiation and incineration at 600C (1,100F).

        • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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          Biologist here. That’s not where I’d put the association. I’m going to simplify things a bit because this is going to be a long post, but hopefully this will help.

          I think you’re thinking about the effects of heat on proteins. We can destabilize macromolecules by heating them, sometimes causing permanent damage. That takes a lot of heat, though. The planet would be long dead before we had to worry about the environmental temperature denaturing proteins.

          Biologist related joke: How do you unscramble an egg?
          Feed it to a chicken.

          So, when the microscope was invented, people were startled to discover what were obviously living organisms in a drop of pond water. Discovery led to discovery, and we ended up learning about bacteria and the germ theory of disease. Some bacteria are really good (in that without them you would die), and some are really bad (like if you get infected you could die), but most are neutral. I do not believe there’s any direct connection between the global temperature and the rate of mutation in bacteria. That’s not to say there’s not a connection between climate change and disease rates. I’ll talk about that later.

          So later on we discovered viruses. Viruses are much smaller than bacteria. While a bacterium is a cell with a whole physiology going on, a virus consists of a bit of genetic material bound in an envelope of proteins. The envelope will gain access to a cell and inject its genetic material, which the cell’s normal processes will start to work on, producing more viruses. Many people don’t consider viruses “alive.” I do, because I’m approaching it from a different direction. Again, the rate of mutation there isn’t really directly affected by a rise in global temperature, but there is a disease rate relationship.

          We only discovered prions more recently. They’re even more simple than viruses. They’re really just a protein. We don’t understand them very well yet. The danger comes from the fact that prions can force other proteins to become copies of themselves. They can cause things like mad cow disease. They’re incredibly hardy and don’t mutate faster because of climate change. They’re very scary diseases with no known treatment and in some cases unknown transmission paths.

          This one is a prion.

          I think we can find correlations between disease in animals and climate change. Climate change forces animals into new environments where they can encounter diseases they’ve never faced before and to which they’re susceptible.

          Even more important is the common root cause of industrialization and human expansion and environmental destruction. Again, forcing more animals together magnifies the impact of communicable diseases, and things like the use of antibiotics to make factory farming as profitable as possible has the inevitable consequences of making diseases that are harder to treat.

          • masquenox@lemmy.world
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            Thanks for the ELI5.

            Apart from ingestion, are there any other known methods of transmission as far as prions are concerned?

            • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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              One of the problems is that we don’t know. It might be environmental contamination (eg deposits on grass or in soil). Ebola patient 0 was thought to be a toddler-aged child who ate a piece of fruit that had been contaminated by dung from an infected bat (Ebola, like many of our diseases, is zoonotic). It’s also thought to potentially come from preparing meat from an infected animal. If it’s in the environment, it may also come from some social behavior, like grooming or wound cleaning. Could it be transmitted by parasites that jump from host to host drinking blood? No idea. I’m just spitballing based on how some other diseases become density dependent.

              Prions are absolutely fascinating. I really hope they make a lot of progress.

        • rtxn@lemmy.world
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          Not this pathogen. Prions are not living organisms, not even as much as viruses, and are extremely resistant to both heat and cold. It’s the same stuff that caused the mad cow disease in Britain.

          • PlantJam@lemmy.world
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            These are actually the cause of Alzheimers

            Are you saying prions cause Alzheimers? Last I heard we didn’t have a full understanding of what causes Alzheimers disease.

  • otterpop@lemmy.world
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    I believe it’s made the jump into a certain species of monkey in a lab environment last I knew, but the jump to humans hasn’t been seen and isn’t a given. This is a clickbait title. If you’re hunting game, make sure to get it tested with samples taken at a wildlife check station before consuming and you’re likely safe here.

  • WhyYesZoidberg@lemmy.world
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    Yeah here we go! We all wanted a zombie outbreak and all we got was corona lockdowns. This is more like it! Bring it on!

    /s

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      Agreed. Kinda wonder if this is going to be what takes us out as a species one day.

      A truck with all the proper paperwork arrives at the border and drops a trailer in the middle of a lot. The doors open and an automated lab just continues to selectively breed up prions in its thousands of samples of human brain cells. Eventually something wanders in, maybe a hungry animal, maybe a curious person. The prion soup enters into the ecosystem.