454
‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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right, prions officially suck.. also no known cure or vaccine..
It's incredibly unlikely that there will ever be a vaccine or cure. Prions aren't a disease like others, put in layman terms they are anti-life.
It's like all the healthy proteins in your body are balancing on a tight rope 10 stories into the air. Prions are what happens when the proteins fall off: the proteins fall to a ground state where they are incredibly stable. Moving them back up would be as difficult as sending lightning back up to the sky, or unbaking a cake. That's why you need to burn them at 600C, they are so stable that they don't even want to react with oxygen. They are like nature's own forever-chemical.
Trying to use analogies to describe prions is hard. What it actually is is a certain type of misfolded protein. That happens all the time–that would be like the humans falling off the tightrope. It doesn't usually affect other proteins, and it usually just makes that individual protein nonfunctional. But prion diseases are proteins that are misfolded in exactly the right way that they cause other proteins to misfold in exactly the same way, which causes other proteins to misfold the same way... It's like kids playing zombie tag, except the kids are supposed to be doing taxes or something so they aren't running away from the chasers, and for some reason as soon as they get tagged they play along and now your taxes never get done and also you die
clearly the answer is friendly prions engineered by AI to defend us