Don’t use common sense. That isn’t allowed on FR and the real world.
Prion diseases are truly terrifying. Random misfolded proteins are a real biological reset concern. Just imagine the world giving out a genetic code that the find out later has slippage points, creating random proteins that may or may not be understood. Throw in the political desire to not look for a protein set of possibilities but also refuse to look if any are being misfolded. Hell it might show up early as a 10-20% increase in mortality then the avalanche.
The issues with CWD in deer has been that it’s stated no one has died from cross contamination but yet we know that isn’t even close to true.
Prion diseases are a truly a possible zombie apocalypse or a species ending issue. I rank prions at the #1 real possible civilization ending disease that isn’t really a disease. It’s a genetic abnormality.
If anyone is a real expert on this, I would love to discuss this but if you’re a dougwayduke BS artist then please don’t bother.
Re: 99 - there has been *decades* of research into TSE, with BSE and Scrapie leading the way.
I don’t find TSE truly terrifying as they are rare, and easy steps can be taken to reduce possible infection vectors to humans. I have raised sheep/goats for decades, and in the hundreds that I have raised none have ever died from scrapie and I know that because of a USDA program to submit the appropriate brain and lymphoid samples for postmortem analysis. No test ever yielded a PrP(Sc) positive result.
Additionally, the research is so advanced into scrapie for sheep that there is a live-animal blood test that can alert if a sheep has a genotype with susceptibility to PrP(Sc). Every one of the submitted samples has come back with having the scrapie resistant RR genotype at codon 171. This blood test has allowed producers to essentially make substantial progress in breeding out sheep that have a genetic susceptibility to PrP(Sc).
Does this mean a sheep could not become infected with atypical scrapie such as the Nor98 strain? No, but the USDA routine slaughter surveillance program samples tens of thousands of sheep per year in the US, so there is a very large data set over the decades. Atypical is very rare as research has indicated that is transmits poorly under natural conditions.
If a human is diagnosed with CJD there is an extensive intake that asks specific questions regarding if the person hunted, how many years, if in agriculture were they a cattle / sheep / goat producer, etc. With that intake, the hundreds of thousands of deer hunters and a cattle / sheep / goat producers provide a large data set with which to draw out potential infection of from TSE. Postmortem examination will definitively yield if a person was genetically susceptible to CJD.
I do not consider TSE even remotely close to a zombie apocalypse or species ending issue. There is simply no research that suggests that is possible, and with larger and larger data sets available, retrospective analysis is providing new insights into TSE going back decades.