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Comment on If someone evil want to murder a lot of people, couldn't they just add prions to meat and slowly infect everyone with Prion Diseases?

Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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:

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.
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.
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.

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jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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. 😥

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- Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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m4xie@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
FBI uncovers diabolical plot to kill everyone in the world by waiting a sufficiently long time.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Brb, I’ll orbit a blackhole at the speed of light. This maneuver is gonna cost us 51 Million Years.
  
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Triumph@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I don’t know about 2 or 3, but you can always just pop down to your local Prions R Us.

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- Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Oh shit. I misread that and bought a Prius.
  
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- Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  “where every little misfold is your own little mystery”
  
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sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

take forever to kill

Arent they simply wrongly-folded proteins

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- Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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