<story><title>When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>YCode</author><text>I understand prion diseases are rare and it&amp;#x27;s more likely I&amp;#x27;ll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept.&lt;p&gt;Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you&amp;#x27;ve got a prion disease it&amp;#x27;s just a matter of time before they end you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spangry</author><text>They really are terrifying. It&amp;#x27;s hard to say exactly why this is so, but I think it has something to do with how they can occur (some protein randomly misfolding) and that they aren&amp;#x27;t really &amp;quot;alive&amp;quot;, in the same sense that viruses and bacteria are.&lt;p&gt;You can kinda forgive viruses and bacteria: they&amp;#x27;re just looking to survive and multiply, just like us. In some cases they monopolise so much of their hosts&amp;#x27; resources, or some really critical resource, that the host dies. But Prions, uhhhhh.... They&amp;#x27;re just kinda these &lt;i&gt;unnatural things&lt;/i&gt; that go wrong and then kill you in pretty awful ways. Though not because they necessarily need to out-compete you for resources. Indeed, they don&amp;#x27;t seem to have any innate preference for existing or not existing, or thriving or not thriving. But they kill you anyway....&lt;p&gt;Also, just to scare you a little more, one of the more popular (perhaps dominant) theories about Alzheimer-family diseases is that they are initially caused by Prions, that migrate into your brain and start forming amaloid plaques, and then it&amp;#x27;s all down-hill from there.&lt;p&gt;On the upside, I vaguely remember reading some research on a &amp;#x27;almost ready&amp;#x27; drug, initially developed to lessen the negative side-effects of chemo-therapy, that might be effective at stopping the progression of these plaques as they spread throughout the brain. If it actually works, we might   have a treatment of AD-family diseases on the market in a year or so (the chemo folks have already gone through the lengthy human safety testing part of the exercise).&lt;p&gt;Not a cure, but at least it might halt or significantly slow progression of symptoms.</text></comment>
<story><title>When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>YCode</author><text>I understand prion diseases are rare and it&amp;#x27;s more likely I&amp;#x27;ll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept.&lt;p&gt;Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you&amp;#x27;ve got a prion disease it&amp;#x27;s just a matter of time before they end you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quantumhobbit</author><text>What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? Are prions targeted by the immune system at all? That to me is what is scary about them.</text></comment>