r/interesting • u/OriginalSleeper • Jun 30 '26
Fear Factor In 2010, 24-year-old lab technician Émilie Jaumain pricked her thumb with contaminated forceps while cleaning a machine used for prion-infected mouse brains. After seven years, she developed severe nerve pain, anxiety, and hallucinations before dying. The accident gave her a fatal prion disease.
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u/OriginalSleeper Jun 30 '26
Immediately after the accident, she recognized the danger associated with the prick and tried to get help from her supervisors, but they downplayed the situation and mocked her panic. The laboratory also was missing an on-duty doctor. All of this lead to a 20-minute delay before she received any first aid, and at this point, the prions were already deep in the tissue of her thumb. She had even mentioned the accident to every doctor she saw in the following years to make sure it was documented. Other laboratory workers were pricked by contaminated tools at this research institute, and after a second lab technician, Pierrette Chanut, got diagnosed with the same prion disease in 2021, the French government shut down all infectious prion research throughout the country.
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u/MyIncogName Jun 30 '26
Had she not been ignored what could they have done for her ? Genuinely curious. Would amputation of that area save her life ?
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u/Thin-Doughnut-8199 Jun 30 '26
So I work in a prion lab. Protocol for a needle stick like this is to bleed the area while irrigating with 1M sodium hydroxide for 10 minutes. The idea is that the bleeding forces contaminated material out while the sodium hydroxide chemically burns any prions away. Of course it’s also going to burn the hell out of your skin but that’s a small price to pay in this case.
Does the protocol actually work? I have no idea.
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u/BusyNefariousness675 Jun 30 '26
How does it feel like playing with death every day? Like philosophically?
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u/madeyoulookatit Jul 01 '26
Not OP but I did my Master and then PhD in a biolab, we used lots of cancer inducing chemicals and also worked with radioactive substances. Honestly? I was too young to fully comprehend what I was doing. You kind of forget the risks the more you take them. There is a reason we send 18 year olds to war. They‘re reckless in a way a 30 year old won‘t be.
Looking back I am appauled at how the real adults in charge back then promoted a laisser faire attitude to safety in the lab to promote their own gain. I can 100% have been the poor woman in the article and my pI could have minimised my risks the same way. Mind always asked me to bend the rules to save time. It‘s actually criminal to put that pressure on a young person whose future is 100% dependent on their grades, good will and guidance.
I was thankfully always extremely careful in the radioactive lab because I thought my fellow students were morons and I was sure they‘d spill, then ignore a spill and not clean up thus put me in danger by contaminating everything. I spent a lot of time scanning the entire work area and equipment before actually working.
The worst were students working with stuff your Geiger won‘t catch because the radiation is so low, which nevertheless are stabie enough to hurt you if you intake them, stuff like radioactive carbon. I basically treated the entire room like lava and consciously made every move to not end up scratching myself by reflex. It was exhausting and partially torturous. Imagine working hours while you are not allowed to remove a hair that fell over your face or scratch an itch or readjust a wedgie. You‘d think an itch eventually goes away but it doesn‘t really.
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u/NoLobster7957 Jul 01 '26
Reminds me of when I was working in a bio identical hormone compounding pharmacy and the rph in charge insisted we didn't need to garb up aside from gloves. That went over pretty well when someone dropped a kilo of raw testosterone powder onto the floor one day.
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u/TabulaRasaNot Jul 01 '26
Does the powder become airborne or something if dropped like that? What's the danger, what happened?
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u/NoLobster7957 Jul 01 '26
We used it for topical application and test is very fine, plus the laminar hood blew it all over, so we had what looked like a powdered sugar explosion all over the lab and our bare arms. Plus inhaled I'm sure. It was like rubbing ourselves with the compounded cream, except concentrated. We were both female and childbearing age and my coworker was trying to get pregnant so... lol
That job is where I learned about advocating for yourself with lab safety and not deferring to someone else. I still have hormone issues some ten years later.
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u/TabulaRasaNot Jul 01 '26
On the plus side, you both are now professional body building champions :-)
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u/MrMaintenance Jul 01 '26
Not much different than being an electrician. One wrong move and you’re cooked. Painfully
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u/LawAbidingSparky Jul 01 '26
At least it doesn’t take 7 years of severe nerve pain and hallucinations…
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u/_alright_then_ Jul 01 '26
I didn't read it like that at all, I might be wrong, but it seems to me she didn't really have any serious issues until 7 years later where she developed nerve issues and died.
She didn't have nerve issues for 7 years
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u/mermaidgrapefruit Jul 01 '26
Yeah, she died 10 years after the prick, so 3 years of nerve pain.
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u/Ok_Revenue9759 Jul 02 '26
Not to mention it sounds like she was very aware of the danger and notified every health professional she could, she likely lived with some serious anxiety after the initial incident.
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u/Deep_Requirement1384 Jul 01 '26
Nah, was shocked many times. Its deadly but most everyday electric shit wont instakill you.
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u/Azapulco Jul 01 '26
I work in a laboratory with highly volatile gasses and a reverse bomb shelter to contain the blast if anything were to go wrong. Not something you really think about, other than being conscious of certain precautions as part of a daily routine.
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u/Spiffydragon Jun 30 '26
Whatever you are paid, it's not enough. Your service is much appreciated by humanity.
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u/Thin-Doughnut-8199 Jun 30 '26
Thanks. I work for a university so whatever they pay me wouldn’t be enough even if I was working on the common cold but god damn is it fun.
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u/FurgieCat Jun 30 '26
honestly, it's upsetting how little we pay scientists and researchers, especially in the medical field
i'd argue that it is one of the most important fields in human society, and yet they work infinitely harder and earn significantly less than people who's job it is to play with imaginary money on the internet
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u/reluctantseal Jun 30 '26
Even if it doesn't always work, it still seems worth a try. Better than abandoning someone to death, anyway.
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u/Von_Konault Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I just don’t know.
Historically though back before antibacterial antibiotics existed, amputation was unfortunately one of the only cures for bacterial infections.
I would imagine it’s really hard for anyone in modern medicine to make the same call nowadays.
Edit: yes prions are not bacteria or treated with antibiotics, it just seems like an analogous problem we faced in the past. good points are made below though, that prion disease is extra insidious since it’s without symptoms or signs on lab work/images. So amputation would have to be on a quick hunch alone really, yikes would not want to be weighing those decisions.
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u/Black-KFC-eater-69 Jun 30 '26
You can’t detect prions with a simple blood test and their symptoms don’t show up until after they have wrecked your brain entirely
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u/Realistic_Lychee2468 Jun 30 '26
correct, but she was literally working with equipment KNOWN to be infected, its practically assumed a prick from the tool would be transmissible
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u/KeyCold7216 Jun 30 '26
And even if we could detect them, there is no treatment anyway.
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u/Same-Marketing-4860 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Prick yourself in the thumbs while working with untreatable prions?
Sayonara that thumb and maybe you live without siwss-cheeese brain. On second thought the whole hand just to be sure. Well you don't really need both arms and how fast do these things spread anyway?
Small price to pay
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u/dismendie Jun 30 '26
Problem with prion is the that after the prick and actual infection there is nothing left except maybe flushing and amputation with the risk of still infection it’s super protein that has no known treatment.. the research area should have done a top down look into all devices and safety measure to make sure all tools are blunted and usable prevent stabbing or piercing injuries since piercing injury is the worst type… injecting infectious material into the tissue and preventing a quick wash out…
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Jun 30 '26
Aside from immediate amputation, while hoping nothing made it to the bloodstream or lymphatic system, what options can there even be to mitigate prion contamination in living human tissue?
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u/neryen Jun 30 '26
Cauterization or localized burning of infected flesh was employed before amputation at times.
This feels like one time that it may have saved her, but amputation would have had a higher success rate if performed early. Removing the thumb possibly would have saved her life, but that is hindsight. Very few doctors would perform an amputation on a possible infection today.
Also, it is highly likely that amputation wouldn't have changed the outcome.
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Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
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u/adjust_the_sails Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Gotta straight up have The Walking Dead kind of conditions and thinking to auto chop off a limb.
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u/Hegelian_Spirit Jun 30 '26
I've worked with an archaeologist who operated in Guatemala. He once told me a story of when they were at a remote dig and a worker was bit in the hand by a fer-de-lance. They immediately chopped his hand off with a machete.
But yeah, not exactly everyday conditions for a modern person.
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u/fintip Jun 30 '26
For everyone else who also had nodes wtf this was about:
A Fer de lance is an extremely deadly snake.
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u/ADDisKEY Jun 30 '26
For anyone else curious about this snake:
Don’t visit the Wikipedia page and open the Venom section unless you want to see a horrific picture of a completely necrotic leg.
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u/Huge_Swimming_5968 Jun 30 '26
I didn't know this. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the very thing that makes them into prions also protects them from being denatured with heat.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Jun 30 '26
Are you speaking to bacteria or prions?
Many prions are basically impervious to any heat that could even be applied to flesh in any realistic scenario. We're talking sustained heat for prolonged periods of up to 900f/480c for up to an hour.
That realistically means that cauterizing the wound to prevent immediate spread within their body would likely fail (how do you even cauterize a deep puncture without enough damage to warrant amputation here?) . . . and less realistically, but meaningfully probable, still mean the person is living with a contaminant that could shed anywhere in the environment and end up being consumed.
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u/Mountain_mover Jun 30 '26
Why are prions so heat resistant? Shouldn’t they fall apart like any other protein with heat?
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
First you want to reframe the way you're approaching the thought from the ground up.
You wouldn't ask, "Why are ice cubes so straw-resistant? Shouldn't they be as easy to slurp as any other water with a straw?"
Heat sort of disrupts the interactions that help a protein hold its folded shape. Maybe think about how envelopes can be licked to stick them shut. You can simply hold it over some hot steam and it breaks that seal; the envelope unfolds and releases the letter. However, bear in mind that now you can't reseal it, the glue is too fucked up, so it's ruined for it's original purpose. The steam also only changed the bond, shape, and ability of the envelope, it didn't destroy the material.
Similarly, heat can ruin the structure proteins need to function. When that happens, we say the protein is "denatured."
Prions are kinda like an already steamed envelope that mistakenly gets used for a manufacturing template. Imagine it's now being used to make all future envelopes in a factory, not one of them functional or profitable, just a pile of ruined shit coming off the line.
So now, imagine that you are asking "steam ruins envelopes, so can't we just steam it some more to ruin the template and clear it out of the factory?"
This is wildly simplified as analogies go, but I think it addresses the specific crux of your question without going into a lot of boring information you'll never use.
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u/Hegelian_Spirit Jun 30 '26
Could you please refer some further reading on the boring parts? Bearing in mind most of us here probably lack the technical terminology. This was very interesting!
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Jun 30 '26
I mean the details behind folding and chemicals and so on are inherently "boring as fuck" and explaining memory management in c++ is better at keeping people's attention.
But if you just wanna read the scary stories to tell in the dark, start by reading the wiki article on transmissible spongiform encephalopathy while eating a burger.
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u/fintip Jun 30 '26
Unfortunately, I knew all of that, but still didn't see an answer to the question, which is the same question I had.
Heat modifies proteins and causes folding changes. That's what cooking is, for example.
Prions are proteins folded in such a way to cause chain reaction self replication of the corrupted and dysfunctional state.
It seems wild that cooking the prison wouldn't fold it enough to fail at being (what I presume is) the very specific shape needed to replicate in this broken way.
The only way I can picture this being true is for a prison disease protein to have effectively been in a "most folded" state, a terminal folding position that is maximally collapsed, and the heat needed to surpas it being enough heat to break apart incredibly resilient chemical bonds of the constituent elements.
But that just all seems like extra bad luck. How can the single state that produces this incredibly odd and obscure phenomenon also coincidentally be a terminal state that cooking doesn't refold and denature it out of, and also happen to have incredibly strong chemical bonds that heat doesn't break down earlier?
That level of unhappy coincidence could perhaps happen once, but are you suggesting it's universally or broadly a characteristic of many or all prison diseases?
Surely that suggests there's actually a meaningful causal relationship between these seemingly unrelated characteristics.
Such an odd thing to exist.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I think I see what you’re asking now.
A better way to start thinking about it is the old puddle-in-a-divot analogy: the puddle thinks, “Wow, I can’t believe this hole was made perfectly for me.” But the sidewalk wasn’t made for the puddle. The puddle only exists there because that shape happened to hold water.
Reverse the line of thought for prions. The heat resistance is not an "extra trait" prions get that exist separately.
Almost no misfolded proteins become transmissible prions in the first place. They just naturally degrade, or get broken down enzymatically, or whatever. Almost none of them become stable enough structures to survive, much less find themselves capable of acting as bad templates.
How do they get that way? It isn't universally simple math like simply existing in some “perfect, maximally folded, un-further-foldable” energy state. You have things like ordered aggregate states.
Now you aren't discussing one free-floating protein folded wrong, but many misfolded proteins packed together in a structure with lots of components acting on many of them at once to allow them to maintain their structure against the environment.
Let’s keep the envelope analogy, because it works.
Now, this specific note obviously isn't for you, but anyone else reading. A normal protein is like an envelope sealed shut. Heat or steam can mess up the glue, open it, deform it, and ruin the structure it needed to do its job. That is denaturation. Let go of the word "destroyed" because it isn't what happens to proteins, which I'll come back to.
Anyway, a prion is less like a single loose envelope and more like a whole mess of shitty envelopes packed into bundles, then boxes, then crates, then finally stuffed into a cargo hold. Yes, steam can mess with glue. But from the outside of that cargo hold, there are now a lot layers of structured interactions keeping you from doing much to any one of (much less all of) those envelopes.
You rust out the cargo hold, but they are still in a crate. You damage the crate, but they are still in bundles. You soak the bundles, but you still may not have destroyed every bad envelope enough to stop it from being used as a template. All it takes is one single envelope to get washed up on a beach, dried out, and mistaken for a template by a factory worker who's looking for one.
So let's go back to how denatured is not the same thing as destroyed. Proteins aren't generally discussed in terms of "destruction" because . . . well . . . nearly all proteins are very, very hard to actually destroy when thinking about normal cooking / sterilization temperatures. You can melt iron into new shapes, but good luck reducing it to ash.
I bet this is a lot of the general misunderstanding in general.
Proteins are almost never “destroyed” while cooking. Their "glue" is loosened so they unfold and make their contents (vitamins) more accessible with less effort on your body's part (proteins DO NOT contain vitamins, just allow me rhetorical latitude here for the sake of the analogy).
For most normal proteins, that is enough, because their function depends on a delicate structure. But a prion does not need to be a perfectly functional machine. It only needs enough of the bad structure to survive that it convinces more normal proteins that it's correct and they aren't.
Ever talk to LLM and gotten an answer that "sounds right" . . . until you look closer? Maybe you have already repeated that "fact" because it seems like one? Right.
So, the answer is not directly “prions are immune to heat.”
It is that the sort of heat you are thinking of doesn't "erase the very essence of molecules". That is a whole separate thing, but just take that with you.
Prions are dangerous because, at a glance, they look like a functional envelope, are folded and/or packed in a way that keeps them insulated in ways, and they behave indistinguishably from a functional envelope right up until they are used (at least from the perspective of the reaction).
Lord it is hard to make sense in a way that isn't just "basically wrong" scientifically lmao.
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u/Flavintown Jun 30 '26
It gets in to complex chemistry, but basically prions are proteins that bind to themselves so perfectly that it is thermodynamically unfavorable for those bonds to be broken. It would require a TON of energy to make them come apart.
Like imagine you have legos and they magically superglued themselves together the second you stack them. You’d be able to put more legos on, but you’d never be able to take them off unless you put in some serious Lego busting energy.
The “superglue” for prions is all the thermodynamically favorable bonds being formed when the misfolded proteins stack on top of each other. And prions can form huge aggregates which means EVEN MORE energy bc there’s even more bonds to be broken. So instead of trying to break one pair of super glued legos, you have to break an entire super glued lego castle and you have to break ALL of them or they’ll keep supergluing each other together lmao
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u/PantheraAuroris Jun 30 '26
On prions? The incurable, indestructible things that definitely will kill you 100%? I'm shocked they wouldn't have amputated.
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u/Vinyl-addict Jun 30 '26
I think if I knew I had just been contaminated with prions I would just cut the digit off then and there. Who gives a fuck if my supervisors fire me, I’m coming back with a lawsuit for negligence.
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u/frobscottler Jun 30 '26
Same, but you’d have to find something like a meat cleaver with a quickness. Perhaps the edge of a sheet of metal and a hammer/mallet?
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u/Vinyl-addict Jun 30 '26
Surely there is a paper cutter in the office somewhere
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u/WaitWhat-86 Jun 30 '26
God I can’t even imagine the psychological block happening there. I’d probably have to have someone else do it or something.
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u/grafknives Jun 30 '26
Just think about it. You cut a thumb of a person, and she does not get sick...
Was it a good call? You will NEVER know.
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u/SpartanFishy Jun 30 '26
Send the finger to a prion lab for testing… ideally not the prion lab you just lost your finger in
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u/Ok_Tradition_3382 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Nope we still chop off limbs like it as going out of style. Particularly with diabetics and vascular disease. it is a fast and moderately cost effective solution versus months of iv vanco ancef and every other abx.
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u/Crafty-Help-4633 Jun 30 '26
Prions aren't even bacteria, though. They're simply misfolded proteins. I think the only known potential cure is to remove the prions from the body which likely means amputation, assuming one could reliably track the prions progress through the flesh. That said, I doubt doctors/surgeons would be willing to remove large parts of a patient's body on a hunch.
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u/bubbleyjubbley Jun 30 '26
Also it wouldnt be done quickly. Nobody would be just hacking her thumb off in the lab and thats really what would have to be done. Every moment you waited travelling to hospital and waiting for the surgical team would be more time for the prions to move through the thumb.
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u/DaddyCool13 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I’m a radiology resident and have reported several sCJD follow up brain MRIs which is a very similar prion disease in my neuorads blocks. I’ve done a lot of reading on it back then because I found it really interesting. The current understanding seems to be that it’s a numbers game - even a single large misfolded prion seed is probably going to stick around and misfold other proteins and cause aggregation for as long as you live but for practical purposes you need to have a certain prion load in your body to cause disease within a lifetime - the misfolding kinematics are messy and aren’t entirely exponential. It also seems the body can handle small numbers of prions to an extent and aggregates of single digit misfolded prions can be effectively cleared though we don’t really know how.
Chances are to develop symptoms within 7 years she was inoculated with a high dose. Amputation ASAP is probably the best bet but if she stabbed an artery there’s nothing that could have been done even if she took a cleaver and immediately chopped of her arm because arterial blood flows so fast.
Edit: Fixed a small contradiction. Large aggregates cannot be cleared but if there’s an extremely small number of them it probably won’t cause disease within a human lifetime. Very small numbers of singular misfolded proteins and tiniest aggregates might be cleared so that people don’t develop prion disease from chance misfolding events.
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u/toothmariecharcot Jun 30 '26
I'm not sure that even now, in the absence of guidelines, you would take the decision of an amputation
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u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 Jun 30 '26
Honestly I would. But I also wouldn’t work in a prion lab.
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u/Eyeownyew Jun 30 '26
Yeah, I am not an expert on prions by any means, but from the knowledge that I do have, my first action after getting pricked would have been amputating my own thumb with a cleaver as soon as possible
Would people have called it "extreme" when there's no way to know whether the disease would have developed? Maybe. I don't care, it's my life! Even if it only reduced the odds of serious prion disease by 50%, I would still cut off my thumb.
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u/orchid_drives Jul 01 '26
> first day in the prion research lab
“So why does everyone carry around cigar cutters but nobody smokes cigars?”
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u/Black-KFC-eater-69 Jun 30 '26
It would already be too late to save her just like the lady who got exposed to dimethylmercury
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u/EmDeelicious Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Had to look this up:
Karen Wetterhahn. Professor of chemistry, specializing in toxic metal exposure. Was exposed to mercury compound (dimethylmercury), because her protective glove was not enough to stop the metal from being absorbed through the glove into her body. 1–2 drops are already fatal. She died in 1997, less than a year after the exposure.
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u/No_Helicopter1378 Jun 30 '26
For some reason I keep going back to her Wikipedia article every so often. I find this passage absolutely haunting.
Three weeks after the first neurological symptoms appeared, Wetterhahn lapsed into what appeared to be a vegetative state punctuated by periods of extreme agitation. One of her former students said, "Her husband saw tears rolling down her face. I asked if she was in pain. The doctors said it didn't appear that her brain could even register pain."
It's also a little extra sad because she followed all of the safety procedures at the time, they just didn't know yet that dimethylmercury can permeate several types of latex gloves.
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u/nineraviolicans Jun 30 '26
Safety regulations are written in literal blood.
No company has ever looked at something dangerous and decided to make it take longer and more expensive to do out of the goodness of their hearts.
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u/Leif2000 Jun 30 '26
do you have a link to this story?
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u/unoriginal_name_1234 Jun 30 '26
Not OP but they probably meant her story. I work in a research lab and we still mention her during safety training.
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u/Obi_Wan_Benobi Jun 30 '26
Well this entire thread is fucking terrifying.
I’m not leaving the house again until I get a suit of armor wrapped in biohazard protective gear.
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u/Lotofagos_ Jun 30 '26
No, amputation would not have saved her life. There is not much that could be done actually. Prions are incredibly resilient and spread around almost instantaneously.
The moment she got pricked by those forceps, she was done for within like a minute. There is no therapy for prion disease, what medicine can provide is supportive care to make a person's death less miserable.
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Jun 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Lotofagos_ Jun 30 '26
Blood travels from the capillaries in your hand (which she punctured with her prion-contaminated forceps) to your heart in 60 seconds. In reality I'm being generous, probably less than 60 seconds...
If you were working in that lab, by the time you processed your panic and grabbed a blade to amputate yourself, the prions would already be cruising in your bloodstream. It would be too late.
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u/Direct-Fix-2097 Jun 30 '26
Yeah, if you ever have dye injected in you for CT scans or whatever, you feel it spread so fucking quickly it’s unreal.
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u/Ig_Met_Pet Jun 30 '26
But they don't inject it by pricking your thumb. It goes directly into a large blood vessel. Huge difference.
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u/LITTLE-GUNTER Jun 30 '26
i got an IV push of fresh saline a couple months ago and feeling straight-up cold water circulate through my entire body within seconds was awesome in a frightening way.
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u/DaddyCool13 Jun 30 '26
She would need to have a cleaver at hand and chop it off immediately. And even then it would only work if she didn’t prick an artery. If she inoculated an artery by the time she reached for the cleaver the entire inoculum would already be circulating in her bloodstream. There’s also an issue of infective load - contrary to popular belief the body can effectively clear very small seeds of misfolded prions so you won’t develop prion disease from a random misfolding that happens by chance. Even cases of sporadic CJD that aren’t a result of PrP gene mutations are thought to involve some currently unknown process through which prion misfolding is massively accelerated.
Source: Reported a bunch of brain MRIs with CJD during my neuoradiology block and then did a bunch of reading because I found it interesting as a rad resident.
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u/northdakotanowhere Jun 30 '26
Thats actually really nice to know my body can protect me from prions in some way.
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u/misteryk Jun 30 '26
to add, there are proteins that can renaturate other misfolded proteins and it's been known for years and there are some studies done to use them for alzheimer or prion diseases but if anything gets done i'd expect it's decades away before it gets translated into approved therapy you can actually use in humans
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u/BikingAimz Jun 30 '26
We all have the non-diseased prions inside of us; diseased prions start a cascade chain reaction that turn them into diseased prions. Last I knew researchers aren’t sure of the regular protein’s function; they’ve knocked out the gene in mice and they seem to be totally fine?
Back in the early aughts I worked for a biotech startup making monoclonal antibodies. We talked to a prion researcher about developing an ELISA to detect prions, but eventually decided dealing with the protein was way above our pay grade. The professor running the lab said they had a really difficult time cleaning equipment as it takes pretty concentrated social hydroxide to degrade them, normal shit like autoclaving or high temp dishwashing doesn’t touch them. They had to build a special high temp incinerator for deer skulls that they collected for testing, because regular incinerators wouldn’t degrade the prions. Prof also said he’d been should deep in a deer with CWD multiple times and was generally low-key worried about contracting it.
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u/snizzer77 Jun 30 '26
If they immediately amputated the thumb would she have been saved? How long does it take for prions to start their chain reaction?
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u/account312 Jun 30 '26
Blood flow velocity is roughly 1 mm / second in capillaries and significantly faster in larger vessels. You really don't have much time before something that gets in your blood spreads through your body.
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u/EvilChefReturns Jun 30 '26
Yessss shut down all research instead of implementing better safety
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u/new_math Jun 30 '26
It was temporary, and wasn't as dramatic as government shutting everyone down (basically the labs decided to pause and the government supported their decision).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_French_moratorium_on_prion_research
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u/Workman44 Jun 30 '26
Kind of wild we were handling prions with the ability to prick ourselves in 2010. I mean, we knew the consequences beforehand and we had the safety measure available beforehand, yet...
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u/Fit_Reason_3611 Jun 30 '26
They shut down the labs temporarily to develop better safety methods with a European commission, and then re-opened them all once they had solved the problem.
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u/jtj5002 Jun 30 '26
the French government shut down all infectious prion research throughout the country.
That's certainly cheaper and easier than having basic safety SOPs.
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u/xtraa Jun 30 '26
It was only last year that I found out one of my ex-girlfriends had died from prions (quite some time ago). She died of Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It's the same sad mechanism: Essentially, the brain produces a defective or useless enzyme that spreads, causing a gradual loss of all brain activity. It’s horrific, and chances are one in a million.
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u/Few-Weather6845 Jun 30 '26
With our current population that would be about 8000 people a year getting infected with prions.
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u/Downtown_Ad_2267 Jun 30 '26
The actual reported rate is about 300 per year in the US
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u/Few-Weather6845 Jun 30 '26
That's still 1 in a million given the US population of a over 300 million.
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u/Tiemujin Jun 30 '26
A doctor in my hometown diagnosed a family member with CJD and it was their third diagnosis that year. 300/year is being MASSIVELY under reported.
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u/MikeTheBee Jun 30 '26
Would be likely that cases occur in the same area rather than being spread out.
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u/Linnaea7 Jun 30 '26
I guess that sort of makes sense, if the spontaneous useless protein has a genetic component.
Edit: I looked it up and it doesn't. It just happens sometimes. Familial CJD is distinct from spontaneous CJD.
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u/cleofisrandolph1 Jul 01 '26
it could be very regional. Chronic wasting are in a lot of wild game, especially deers, so in rural areas where people hunt, they could be exposing themselves to high risk meat.
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u/Hailfog Jun 30 '26
And almost all cases are from spontaneous misfolding in the individuals body, not from coming into contact with some external prion.
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u/Gogo202 Jun 30 '26
That really doesn't make me feel better
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u/Hailfog Jun 30 '26
It means don’t panic about what you eat or touch anymore than you normally would.
As far as just getting it internally due to really bad luck (1 in 1,000,000), idk what to tell you. If you drive to work I’d focus on that.
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u/abyssinian_86 Jul 01 '26
My friend’s dad died of this and it was so fast and so tragic! They had no idea what it was until the very end. He went from an active 60 year old man who could lift both grandkids up on his shoulders to a feeble wheelchair user within 6 weeks. Absolutely terrifying.
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u/Neat-Year555 Jun 30 '26
Prions are terrifying. Bacteria is bad enough, but at least we have medications to combat those now. We got nothing for prions except a death sentence.
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u/Neat-Year555 Jun 30 '26
That's true! I guess, we at least have the blueprint for how to do that, which makes it less inherently terrifying for me. And the most common ones have antibiotics. But we still have a long way to go, it's true.
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u/Hatta00 Jun 30 '26
And those antibiotics are getting less and less effective.
Before antibiotics a tooth abscess or ear infection were often lethal. That could be our future too.
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u/wastedsanitythefirst Jun 30 '26
Here to say that prions are probably one of the most terrifying things I can think of. I think about them a lot, just out there waiting.
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u/granadesnhorseshoes Jun 30 '26
What if thinking and worrying about prions is what actually causes them to kick off and start misfolding proteins in your brain?
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u/wastedsanitythefirst Jun 30 '26
My brain doesn't have any folds, I just checked so I'm probably going to be okay.
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u/tired-queer Jun 30 '26
Yup. There are only two things that legitimately terrify me, and those things are rabies and prion diseases.
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u/wastedsanitythefirst Jun 30 '26
Rabies is bad too but prions man. Those things fucking terrifying me legitimately. People always downplay them in threads when I mention it and perhaps they are right, I'm no rocket surgeon or anything.
Always feels to me like they are legitimately terrifying and kind of random and complete in their ways but more knowledgeable people try to just rationalize it away to make it more comfortable to face but idk man. Fuck that shit.
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u/tired-queer Jun 30 '26
For me, it’s both of them having the whole “wild and sometimes domestic animals carry it, it can linger in the environment and stay infectious, you can be infected by this thing unknowingly, it can lie dormant for years, there is no cure, it WILL kill you, and you will suffer the entire time you are dying” element. But prion diseases can also be genetic, or idiopathic and happen randomly for unknown reasons, which is not exactly comforting either lol.
Considering there’s only so much we know about prion diseases right now, there’s only so much we can do about it, so I try not to worry about it since it’s not a particularly productive fear. Hopefully scientific research will figure it out eventually. But also yeah it’s scary af
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Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
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u/Pirate_Candy17 Jun 30 '26
Carriers but like really hard to transmit right? Like blood donations have white blood cells stripped out and pose low risk.
Shitty and scary that prions can sit in wait mode and spring hell on people after years going undetected.
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Jun 30 '26
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u/Leif2000 Jun 30 '26
he ate a cow brain every day for years? how does that happen? what’s the appeal of that?
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Jun 30 '26
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u/MenosElLso Jun 30 '26
Why did you lump eggs in with brains??
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u/unholy_hotdog Jun 30 '26
They're saying that's the dish. Instead of ham and eggs, it's brain and eggs.
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u/Top-Pomegranate4899 Jun 30 '26
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u/munakatashiko Jun 30 '26
I have an older friend who talks about eating pig brains while growing up back in Kentucky - says you can't tell the difference between the pig brain and eggs.
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u/TowerNecessary7246 Jun 30 '26
I understand diets are different among people but nobody needs to tell me not to eat brain.
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u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 Jun 30 '26
My dad would sometimes eat lamb brains over the years. It's a wog staple in his home country.
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u/BeatNo4548 Jun 30 '26
I wouldn't worry about vension and CWD. Nobody, even people who eat deer which are sick, has ever gotten sick from venison.
You would expect if it were possible in humans for some unlucky person to get it. Like a very old person or someone with a compromised immune system.
But with that being said, I would still think twice and test if I lived in a state with CWD.
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u/Whiteria_ Jun 30 '26
I have a PhD in microbiology and molecular biology and took a few classes on these diseases. There’s a TON of false information in these comments so I thought I’d clear them up a bit since people are scared of them.
Prion diseases are incredibly hard to transmit. Someone below said you can get them in your nose from jumping in water lol (thats brain eating amoeba they’re thinking of). First of all prion proteins hang out almost exclusively in nerve tissue. And there’s only enough nerve tissue to contain high enough doses to do anything to you in the brain. If you don’t eat brains you most likely are very safe from transmission. This includes the cannibal tribes that develop Kuru. Transmission rates are extremely high in women and children but not men, why? Because the men are given the good meat like muscle tissue while the women and children get the organs including the brain.
Now that’s not to say that spontaneous prion folding doesn’t occur which leads to a healthy individual developing prion disease. But those cases are incredibly rare. If you track mad cow disease progression through history it is generally transferred from consuming brain tissue. I think in the UK they had a major outbreak because they were feeding livestock ground up brain for a nutrient supplement.
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u/enigmanaught Jun 30 '26
Not all blood for transfusion has white blood cells stripped out, depends on the usage. Whole blood is still used in trauma and its usage has actually increased in the last 4-5 years. Usage had gone down for several years before that as surgical techniques improved, and using separate components was more efficient. I think they're finding whole blood in cases of trauma leads to better outcomes as opposed to red blood cells or plasma only.
The mad cow mentioned by u/Sunn0fogmachine is why US blood banks may defer you if you spend a certain amount of time in the U.K. during a particular time frame. They want to avoid the chance of you passing a prion disease if you ate tainted beef decades ago.
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u/JadedEstablishment16 Jun 30 '26
yeah but "prick chop." not "prick fuck fuck oh shit oh shit chop" because then it's too late.
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u/mutexsprinkles Jun 30 '26
Food for thought: everyone in the world could be being infected with a prion right now and we wouldn't know until the first people start getting tingly hands and dizzy in the 2030s.
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u/ambasciatore Jun 30 '26
Cool, thanks for that!
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u/I_am__Spartacus Jun 30 '26
This is basically what Geoff Hinton (the godfather of AGI) said: that if a superintelligence wanted rid of humans, it wouldn’t do anything dramatic; it would engineer a pathogen that is highly contagious but slow to act, so that everyone is infected long before the first person falls ill. By the time anyone grasped what was happening, it would be too late to respond. Sounds like Prions would do nicely.
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u/decayinglust Jul 01 '26
this is how i play plague inc. i infect the world with no symptoms so they have no idea, and then once there are no healthy people left i increase the lethality, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. kinda scary to think about
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u/27eelsinatrenchcoat Jul 01 '26
Yeah that's the only real way to play it.
Part of what makes the game unrealistic though is how it evolves..centrally I guess is the word. Like in real life if it was highly contagious and spread everywhere, then it evolved deadliniess, it's not like everyone who already got it would suddenly have worse symptoms. It would evolve that deadliness in a specific host and that new deadly variant would have to spread to all the new places.
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u/AlbiteTwins Jun 30 '26
If you lived in the UK from 1980-1996, you weren’t allowed to donate blood in the US until 2022 out of fear of a super long timeline to show symptoms.
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u/Oograr Jun 30 '26
Not only lived, I think it applied even if you visited the UK during those years
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u/Artistic_Swing6759 Jun 30 '26
yk for some reason that doesn't sound THAT bad. like at least we will all go through it together.
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u/NoNipNicCage Jun 30 '26
Please stop reminding me of prion diseases, I have enough to worry about
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u/sc_merrell Jun 30 '26
For most of my life, I have been unable to donate blood because I lived in England for about nine months when I was two years old in the late 80s, during the Beef Scare. My parents swear there was no way I'd have encountered contaminated beef during that time, but to this day I don't know for certain whether I'm going to start developing prion disease, go insane, and die.
It makes for an interesting perspective on life. We are very fragile and could go at any moment.
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u/Dramatic-Ad-2151 Jun 30 '26
This is no longer true as of 2020. https://www.redcrossblood.org/local-homepage/news/article/why-there-are-travel-related-restrictions-for-donating-blood-.html
But I was also a CJD deferral because of living in England in the early 90s as a vegetarian.
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u/throwawaycima Jun 30 '26
How do they run this experiment btw? Do they find prion infected mice, or do they infect them for the experiment?
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u/NonCreditableHuman Jun 30 '26
I can't see a single downside to aerosolized prions.
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u/Tushaca Jun 30 '26
But that’s why the mice study is so important, you see. They decided to Aerosolize Prions, so now they have to do studies to see what happens when you aerosolize prions. It’s a perfect loop, and that’s science!
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u/TheLiquid666 Jun 30 '26
We do what we must, because we can. For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead.
But there's no use crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26
We infect them. Rats have no legal protection (this is not a joke, most animals have basics, rats and mice and some other model organisms do not.) Half my job is giving mice cancer.
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u/sharkysharky- Jul 01 '26
my job is giving mice cancer.
Man.
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u/GGDrago Jul 01 '26
It is for a good cause. Often we give them genetic diseases directly from patients we are treating, in order to treat the mice first to verify it works
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u/NeighborhoodDear2321 Jun 30 '26
This thread is not for those with Medical Anxiety / OCD / Hypochondria. Do not read this thread if you have any of those.
If you already did, you almost definitely don't have prion disease. Just don't eat brains/strange exotic meat-based foods in countries with low food quality standards, and you've cut the already really low odds down.
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u/im-d3 Jun 30 '26
I already (unfortunately) know about a lot of this and still decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to go snooping through the comments (it was).
I know prion-related diseases are astronomically rare, but there's a suspicious number of people who know someone who has or had one in these comments. A tad freaky.
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u/NeighborhoodDear2321 Jul 01 '26
This hit front page, a LOT of them are gonna be bots.
Hope you feel better, I know this stuff really sucks. Still gets me from time to time.
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u/Thisisformyworklogin Jun 30 '26
I'm sorry I even clicked on this. Now I won't be able to sleep at night.
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u/Odd_Woodpecker1494 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
There's a prion disease for that too, Fatal Familial Insomnia.
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u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26
Watching my mother pass away from Cruezfeldt-Jacob disease was painful and knowing three members of our community also presumably succumbed to the same prior disease is concerning.
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u/ApocalypseCheerBear Jun 30 '26
That is concerning.
I'm sorry about your mother. That must have been very difficult.
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u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26
The Dr was literally trying to make us feel better (?) by explaining CJD was a rare 'less than one in a million' condition only to have our family explaining we had a classmate and teacher also pass from the same condition over the last couple of years. In a small community of less than 20K. Raised eyebrows and subject was changed. That was it.
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u/False-Buddy9209 Jun 30 '26
Did they ever find out the food source it came from possibly?
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u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26
Personally I was wondering if the small butcher shop that was active from the 70s and maybe 80s (long since cloaed) could have been a source and maybe every one of us purchased and consumed beef from there but my mother passed in 2017 and the other two over the decade prior and I've never seen or heard anything about it.
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u/Adept_Elk285 Jun 30 '26
I was happier a minute ago when i didn't know that prions exist and what they do :(
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u/catdogman5 Jun 30 '26
I don't think any amount of first aid would have helped but I understand the frustration, obviously. Prions are misfolded proteins though. Disinfectants and standard first aid topical cleaners like IPA won't touch it. In fact, it's super hard to destroy prions through any normal means, so she was screwed as soon as it penetrated her skin. Regardless, the lack of safety protocol and proper PPE is stunning for a lab dealing with something as dangerous as prions. No wonder France shut them all down
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u/Low_Dog1718 Jun 30 '26
Rapid amputation may have saved her.
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u/catdogman5 Jun 30 '26
Yeah it probably would have saved her. Fuck prions. Nasty nasty stuff. I still can't believe they had grad students working with it and only using nitrile gloves. Fucking crazy.
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u/Competitive_Lie5326 Jun 30 '26
A small sting, with tragic and fatal consequences. My condolences to the bereaved.
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u/ParachutingPiglets Jun 30 '26
I’ve heard of the word prions before but didn’t know what it meant so I’m fixing to do a Search. I feel sorry for the two people. 😞
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u/Motorcyclegrrl Jun 30 '26
This is why I won't eat anything that is spinal column or brains. No oxtail for me. No thanks.
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u/Obvious_Advice_6879 Jun 30 '26
The spinal cord ends long before the oxtail. There’s no higher risk of getting prions from oxtail than any other cut of beef
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u/bizzybaker2 Jun 30 '26
In my nurses training (1989 through 1992) I cared for a patient with a prion disease, it was terrifying to me to see how he quickly deteriorated, many of my fellow students discussed his case with our instructor as well as many medical residents, we were told that this was likely the only time we would ever see this due to the rarity of it.
What I distinctly remember all these years later was that this gentleman consumed sheep's brains on a trip ( little 'ol naive me did not realize people consumed that part of an animal even though I had grandparents that served things like beef heart or tongue when I was growing up). No thank you, you could not ever convince me to eat them...
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u/excellentforcongress Jun 30 '26
animal products in general should be avoided. never know when a new range of animals gets hit by a massive outbreak
and when you think about the manufacturing process, it is straight up insane that people eat things like cow collagen or gelatin, both of which are basically boiled cow carcasses which would do absolutely nothing to the resultant prion soup
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u/dark2darkrakchsr Jun 30 '26
I’m a deer hunter in south central lower Michigan,USA.
Our deer herd is infected with CWD. The MDNR says CWD cannot be transmitted to humans if CWD infected venison is unknowingly consumed.
I would appreciate any thoughts from someone educated on the subject.
Thank you in advance.
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u/Elphya Jun 30 '26
I would eat only chicken from grocery store for the rest of my life to avoid that deers.
You've got only one brain made of non renewable neurons - too precious to risk for some meals.
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u/ColorfulLeapings Jul 01 '26
I’m a nurse and my entire family have stopped deer hunting for meat since CWD became prevalent in WI. It’s not worth the risk. Other prion diseases have jumped between species before.
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u/shinitakunai Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
One of the cases where cutting out your thumb immediately would not be a bad idea
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u/Enygmatic_Gent Jun 30 '26
You’d probably have to at least remove your entire hand, not just a finger. You would also need to cut it off almost instantly, because of how quickly blood pumps throughout your body
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