I mean poisoning can be immediately detected, how do you even detect prions. Such a terrorist can murder a lot of people before ever getting caught, right?
Sorry if this sound stupid lol
it can take years to see any effect, if at all. PRION cases are very rare. you would need to source the prions from somewhere, its usually from infected nervous tissue or animals with the disease. your better of using an actual infectious agent like a deadly food poisoning bacteria.
Want to be evil but too lazy to get out there? Too afraid you might get caught? What if I told you that you could participate in a group effort to kill people? And all you have to do is sit back, enjoy yourself, and burn that energy! Between 2000–2019 studies show approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths occur each year! That’s right! All you need to do to contribute to the death of humans is pump up that global warming! So blast that heater in the winter, your AC in the summer, and eat as much meat as you like! Sure, it might be a bit pricy, but that’s what work is for! And don’t forget the workplace can encourage death too! You can rest easy knowing those old, usless fogeys and those noisy babies will be the first to go with the ensuing heatwaves! If you come into a large chunk of money, consider opening a gas station! There, you can peddle ciggarettes and nicotine, alcohol depending on your state, and don’t forget those sweet, sweet, (corn syrupy sweet!) fountain sodas that contribute towards the obesity epidemic! Plus you get to fuel cars that pump more carbon into the air and support the oil industries that pollute the environment! Remember, there’s always plenty of legal ways to contribute to human deaths! So relax and do your part, and remember, humanity likely won’t kill all life, as it’s rather tenacious. But we can certainly make this planet inhospitable enough that the humans’ll all die off! And that’s the goal!
Remember, there’s always plenty of legal ways to contribute to human deaths!
Brb, joining the US Military as a drone operator for the Middle East Region
/j
The issue with prions is they’re not that contagious. An infected person is not a danger to other people. This means you need to contaminate all the meat in the food supply because you can’t rely on transmission.
Anyone making a bio weapon would go after a virus or fungus. Easier to cultivate, dispurse, and work with. Something that’s contagious and self replicating makes it much easier to hide the initial infection point.
If you wanted to go dowm that route of thinking then careful application of money toward long-term political movements would yield better results.
Luckily thats totally in the real of science fiction.
Not an expert on the subject by any means, but i do know a little bit. The biggest issues with using prions as a bioterrorism vector are:
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Sourcing prions. There isn’t really any reason that anyone would want prions outside of a laboratory environment. They aren’t exactly something you can go pick up at the store or synthesize yourself. Getting enough to poison the food chain would likely be significantly more difficult than something more common and deadly like botulism.
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Poisoning. If you wanted to use prions en masse as a poison, you’re going to need to get access to a meat processing plant and figure out a way to actually do the poisoning. This might not be the biggest hangup considering recent revelations (boars head meat). Still, meat is not as easy to adulterate as something like produce, where you can simply spray the food with your poison at virtually any point in the supply chain.
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Time. Prions take forever to kill. For mad cow, we’re talking years. For CJD, were talking decades. Terrorists typically like to create terror to make a statement. Are prion diseases scary? Yes, but the fact that you wouldn’t even know about the poisoning for years makes it pretty bad as a tool for terror.
Essentially, no one uses prions as a weapon because if you’re going to carry out a bioterror attack, there are much easier to acquire and more effective agents. That being said, please do not commit bioterrorism or any other form of terrorism. It’s very mean and unnecessary.
FBI uncovers diabolical plot to kill everyone in the world by waiting a sufficiently long time.
Brb, I’ll orbit a blackhole at the speed of light. This maneuver is gonna cost us 51 Million Years.
Essentially, no one uses prions as a weapon because if you’re going to carry out a bioterror attack, there are much easier to acquire and more effective agents.
When I saw your long comment, I was really hoping for some reassurance around how many safeguards would prevent what OP described. Now I’m twice as worried. 😥
Eh, I wouldn’t be. The only groups that have both the knowledge and the resources to carry out large scale bioterrorism are state actors. The soviets and Brits had a couple of oopsies during the Cold war and killed a few of their own. Other than that, imperial Japan is the most recent group to launch major bio attacks against their enemies, and that was 80 years ago.
Bioterrorism just isn’t that appealing to most countries that have the capability because it has a ton of collateral damage and (rightfully) makes you look like a supervillain, which will likely make even the strongest allies reconsider support.
Don’t worry about bioterrorism, your chances of experiencing it are pretty much zero.
take forever to kill
Arent they simply wrongly-folded proteins? Is it more like neutralised or something like that?
I think I could have worded that better. I didn’t mean that it takes forever to “kill” the prions, but that prion diseases take years to kill their hosts.
As far as destroying the prions themselves, I believe that the primary method of sanitizing medical instruments is to soak them in bleach, then lye, then many hours in an autoclave.
I don’t know about 2 or 3, but you can always just pop down to your local Prions R Us.
Oh shit. I misread that and bought a Prius.
“where every little misfold is your own little mystery”
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Why use something so hard to contain and infect people with? Ricin is easier to obtain and works super fast. Dump a bunch in the water table and take out entite cities.
Ricin doesn’t work. Jesse Pinkman will run all the way from his cabin in Canada and stop you before it happens, he developed a 6th sense to detect Ricin after… well you know… that happened.
In addition to the other answers here, the incubation period for prion diseases is quite long. Based on a quick search they seem to take anywhere from five to 40 years to even start showing symptoms. A killer would probably want more immediate results.
No ones been evil enough to think of it. Till now!
Omg, I bet the alt-universe evil me is doing a bunch of Bio-terrorism right now
LOL! Seriously. You need to channel that “alt-universe evil me doing a bunch of Bio-terrorism” into a comic book, novel, movie or something. I think I mentioned it to you before in one of your previous posts.
Anyway, I have nothing to contribute about Prion disease unless you twist it into a zombie plot… After all, it does lead to brain damage with symptoms similar to dementia.
I may not always engage but I do appreciate your creativity and enjoy your posts! As always, 👍
That’s basically the plot of the next Avengers movie.
No, he’s currently preparing a cure. The evil version is in this universe. You just haven’t gotten around to it… Yet
Be the change you want to see!
Just spent my dinner reading about prion diseases. Huh turns out if I had the genetic fatal insomnia, it’d start showing signs in the next few years.
Might get off the Internet for a while.
Does someone in your family have it? That’s a bigger indicator than anything else.
No, I’m fairly certain the few dementia cases were Alzheimer’s. Anxiety disorders do run in my family, though! On both sides.
Thank you for the reassurance.
Read The Family That Never Sleeps
Pretty sure that same person would need to also be suicidal as exposure would also infect them. I’m not a microbiologist but from what I understand, they are pretty resilient to everything that would destroy anything by else and even a slight accident exposure and you’re screwed.
Prion diseases aren’t really that infectious, you’d need to eat or inject the prions. They’re tough as hell, but they aren’t airborne.
That’s good to know. I was thinking back to that researcher that was infected while taking precautions. Wish I could find the old story. Either way, prions are insanely scary. No treatment, certain death, not even alcohol or fire kills them.
If it’s any consolation, prion disease occurance is almost entirely genetic. The mad cow scare in the EU in the early 00’s is really the only major case of a threat within the food supply, and it was pretty quickly fixed by changing how animals are handled (especially sick ones). Outside of that, the only other transmission between hosts has been observed in tribal rituals involving eating the brain of a loved one after they die, and improperly sterilized medical instruments used during brain/spinal surgery.
So don’t eat human brain and make sure that you’re getting your brain surgery done with either new instruments or ones that have been properly autoclaved and you should be good as long as you don’t just randomly get CJD due to genetics. Not much you can do about that, though.
You’ll probably get done in by heart disease, a car accident, and lightning a couple of dozen times before you need to worry about contracting a prison diseases.
But you have to consume the prion-infested food to actually get it. Pretty sure that Prion Diseases aren’t by skin contact or airborne.
