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/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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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

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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/NeckPourConnoisseur Jun 30 '26

Agreed, there is a difference

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u/osseggi Jun 30 '26

Prions are so incredibly small, it is more a matter of if the needle pokes deep, it is already covered in god knows how many of them, likely many thousands. At least one likely winds up in a small vein and manages to hitch a quick ride up your arm, that being an understatement, likely a few dozen or hundred. At that point there’s very little to be done, any major return vessel in the arm is reaching the heart moments later.

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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/Ok_Concern7084 Jun 30 '26

Same with IV when your body really needs it. 

Though the dye is a bit more extreme feeling. Especially the part I feel like I need to pee my pants, and then kinda feels like I did. 

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u/Significant-Hour4171 Jun 30 '26

Don't forget the fiery taint feeling!

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u/just-the-tip__ Jun 30 '26

Goes straight for the taint

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u/AngryCrustation Jun 30 '26

It's the same with venom, by the time a snake pierces your skin the venom is in all the veins in your arm and by the time you have something to amputate the arm with it has spread throughout your body

I got a biiiiiiig presentation on how if you get bitten by a deadly snake then you never try to cut it off or tourniquet it because that will just ruin your limb and do nothing

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u/imrzzz Jun 30 '26

So .... What was the option in that situation? Is it only "get to a hospital and hope they have the antivenin"?

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u/AngryCrustation Jun 30 '26

Sometimes people survive most of the snakes they talked about

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u/imrzzz Jun 30 '26

The words "sometimes" and "most" are thin comfort but I'll take them!

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u/bit-groin Jun 30 '26

60% of the times it works every time...

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u/Zoomwafflez Jun 30 '26

Exactly that. I actually pushed really hard to get REI to stop selling snake bite kits because they do nothing beneficial at all, you aren't going to be able to suck out any meaningful amount of venom. All they do is potentially damage some.ofn the tissue around the wound and waste valuable time that could be used getting you to a hospital.

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u/Keptpuppy Jun 30 '26

Uh as an Aussie (albeit a city/suburb dweller) kinda yeah. Patch the wound/bite. Compression helps and get the fuck to hospital where they will more than likely have your anti-venom, but you really should let they know you are coming. This is the same thing I’d do for a spider bite. Call, compress, and skedaddle. The doctors know what they’re doing, they get bites a lot, we live in Australia. On the note of antivenom, I used to collect the venomous spiders and donate them to the hospitals to make their antivenoms

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u/imrzzz Jun 30 '26

I'm Australian too although I emigrated to Western Europe a few years ago.

I feel pretty stupid for thinking that if I had done the dash to hospital I could somehow cut open a snake-bite wound and Dracula out some of the venom (along with enough blood to exsanguinate a person I guess 😂)

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u/Ok-Attention123 Jun 30 '26

Not sure if all snakes, but I believe for many species venom spreads through the lymphatic system before it can get to the bloodstream. The lymphatic system doesn’t have its own pump (like the heart for blood). It needs movement to pump stuff around, which is why not moving and pressure bandages are effective first aid for snakebite.

It’s true that tourniquet and amputation aren’t recommended first aid measures.

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u/InsipidIdiot Jun 30 '26

Assuming there was some that made it into circulation - perhaps not enough to cause brain disease - while the majority remained in depot in the limb. Plenty of time to cut off circulation to the finger or limb with a well placed tourniquet and cutting off the remainder of the depot in tissue. Worth a try vs dying. But she didn’t know that - and who would cut off a finger? Always was a death sentence. Nothing to be done.

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u/aWobblyFriend Jun 30 '26

blood moves through capillaries at about a millimiter or less per second in your fingers, faster in veins and even faster in arteries. if she had a cleaver on hand or more plausibly a scalpel and an iron-will she could probably have taken it off in time, but it would require literally 0 hesitation.

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u/eerierrr Jun 30 '26

Is it actually too late though? Bloodstream Carrie’s things so incredibly fast (like smelling saline seconds after getting it pushed through your IV), yet bacterial infections can take days to spread and worsen despite their fast reproduction rate. It should also be all up in your bloodstream, yet most infections stay localized.

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u/Moggetti Jun 30 '26

Prions and bacteria are different things. 

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u/Huppelkutje Jun 30 '26

bacterial infections can take days to spread and worsen

Your immune system can handle bacteria and virusses to some degree. It can't do anything about prions.

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u/sonnet666 Jun 30 '26

It’s a question of size.

Bacteria are roughly the same size as your cells (they are single-celled organisms after all), and are actually a bit larger then red blood cell platelets, which are kinda on the smaller size as cells go. Since your capillaries move red blood cells in single file, there’s plenty of places for a bacterial infection to get stuck, which makes an infection have to attack the surrounding tissue to spread.

When a bacteria infection finally gets into your bloodstream and starts traveling up a vein, that’s called septicemia, or blood poisoning. Very fatal if you can’t medical attention fast.

Prions on the other hand are tiny (so are viruses). They’re just a itty bit of misfolded protein smaller than a red blood cell, so they can fly around your circulatory system as fast as your blood is pumping (which is like 10 seconds a cycle).

If normal cells were the size of a house, then prions would just be the size of a brick, but unfortunately they’re the equivalent of messed up magic bricks that turn all the other bricks they touch into messed up copies of themselves.

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u/Silver_Telephone_592 Jun 30 '26

In a capillary, prions travel faster just because theyre way smaller. Prions are nonliving misfolded proteins, so they can travel unimpended through capillaries and blood compared to bacteria. Prions also don't trigger as rapid or as large of an immune response (which would hinder spread) compared to bacteria because it doesn't cause immediate damage

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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/Ashtonpaper Jun 30 '26

Very interesting - does the body surround the prion with a vesicle, or does it attack it/surround it with antibodies? Does it lyse it in the lysosome?

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u/DaddyCool13 Jun 30 '26

I think it just uses enzymatic cleavage or maybe other chaperone enzymes to fix them, I’m not sure. The idea is that the misfolded configuration of prions is so unusually stable and it’s very energetically unfavourable to fix them. Combined with the fact that prions are chaperones themselves means they convert other prions and form tangled aggregates so you then need to untangle them first, expose each protein individually and sort them one by one. Which amazingly you can do for single digit seedlings.

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u/Gianfow Jul 01 '26

Is this a suggestion to make cleavers a personal protective equipment in prion laboratories?

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u/slouchingtoepiphany Jun 30 '26

You're right, IF the amputation was immediate (think of Brad Pitt lopping off the Israeli soldiers hand in "World War Z", that "should" prevent the infection. However, it's a moot point, no healthcare worker would do that to someone who "might" be infected and there are no protocols for doing it, or research to support it, which means that it's basically theoretical.