Comments on: Fear and Trembling: Prion diseases on Twitter

By: I_of_Horus

I_of_Horus — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Here’s a clip of a Kuru sufferer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8tmgpOiWRw

By: scientist

scientist — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:48:00 +0000

Dear Dr. Koerth-Baker,
It might be work repeating that there is reason, first brought forward by the anonymous author of the blog http://www.science-fraud.org, to believe that one of the tenets of the prion idea,that the altered conformation can propagate in vitro, rests at least in part on manipulated image data. While I understand that as a new media journalist, one might find this anonymity to be problematic, the blogger self identifies as a working scientist who had reviewed numerous grant applications for public funds. For what it is worth I find this implicit argument for anonymity to be compelling. I understand that new-journalistic etiquette here hasn’t gelled yet, but I believe that the work alerting readers to issues with the published work constitutes a public service. In any case it has already served to cast into doubt one of the pillars of the currently accepted view of prion-caused disease, at least among some members of the scientific community.

By: Michele

Michele — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 02:41:00 +0000

Interestingly several people in the Southern US also suffer from a similar disease, from eating squirrel brains.
We concentrate a bit too much on kuru and its exoticism I think (it fits comfortably with the Western barbarian/headhunter narrative we have about South Sea islands), and not enough with similar disease manifestation in the Western world. As you pointed out, it’s not just about cannibals or industrial farming.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:35:00 +0000

It looks like sniping from the sidelines to me. And when linking to your own blog, you generally identify yourself as the blog author. Failing to do so makes it look like astroturf.

By: michael.kovari

michael.kovari — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:44:00 +0000

If you look at the evidence on science-fraud. org, you would not write this.Anonymous bloggers have very good reasons to remain anonymous. Anonynity does not equal invalidity

By: James Agenbroad

James Agenbroad — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:28:00 +0000

And it was mentioned in an episode of Scrubs.

By: James Agenbroad

James Agenbroad — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:26:00 +0000

But the lack of clarity is kind of the point…This is as much a post about how misleading tweets are as it is about the history of kuru.

By: James Agenbroad

James Agenbroad — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:23:00 +0000

Sounds like an excuse for men to get the tasty bits and for the women t0o get left with what is essentially human scrapple…

By: smut clyde

smut clyde — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:18:00 +0000

the prions causing mad cow will be present in the ashes of the remains and can infect anyone ingesting those prions.

Isn’t that how “Return of the Living Dead” ends?

By: Ghostfucker

Ghostfucker — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 04:09:00 +0000

I lived in Germany as a child in the late 80′s as well, and was always taken out of line during school blood drives when I moved back to the US. Understanding the long incubation period of Mad Cow makes the restriction seem more sensible, when at the time it always seemed like a ridiculous piece of red tape. Of course knowing about the long incubation period isn’t terribly comforting for me!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:49:00 +0000

Your proof is a link to an anonymous blog written by you. Forgive me if I don’t take you seriously.

By: fredfraudster

fredfraudster — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:23:00 +0000

You know the major players in the prion field have all recently been accused of scientific fraud, right? Read it at http://www.science-fraud.org. All the evidence right there for everyone to see for themselves, copying and pasting of western blot images, re-use of microscopy images, faking of data, the whole lot! Click the prion tag down the bottom right of the page for the articles on Claudio Soto, Stan Prusiner and others. It’s all a sham (not to mention thermodynamically impossible!)

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:11:00 +0000

Civilized people don’t eat their parents.

They eat their god.

Who, by the way, could do with a little cheese or salsa or something. Would some salt diminish the holiness?

By: Reg Robson

Reg Robson — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:05:00 +0000

Sounds like time to set up a study.

By: tortoiseparade

tortoiseparade — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:52:00 +0000

I’m surprised that after 40 odd comments to this piece not one person has brought up William Arens and the considerable controversy surrounding the cannibalism theory of the kuru epidemic, in both the medical and anthropological communities. According to Arens, there were defects in the research methodology of Daniel Gajdusek who won the Nobel Prize for his research into Kuru. For example, correspondence written by Gajdusek indicates that he had concluded that the highlanders of New Guinea were cannibals, before conducting any research or field interviews. Furthermore, he misrepresented photos of people eating pork as pictures of people eating human flesh. A lot of people would say that Gajdusek’s conclusion has been debunked, but I’d probably just say it’s been harshly questioned.

There was a fascinating debate – one of the biggest debates in late-20th century anthropology — over whether south seas cannibalism actually existed, or was merely the product of European racist fantasy, primarily carried on (if I recall from correctly) between Marshall Sahlins on one side, and Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere, on the other.

It’s worth checking out!

By: Ron Georg

Ron Georg — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:18:00 +0000

Absolutely. That’s the problem with epidemiological studies–there are too many variables. It may turn out not to be dietary at all. Although, when Japanese families move to the United States and adopt a standard American diet, their health patterns quickly start to resemble those of other Americans.

By: Evan G.

Evan G. — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:21:00 +0000

Thanks for this. If I can add my own thoughts about people live-tweeting conferences…I hate it. It can easily become too much clogging up my feed, so I either mute the conference hashtag or unfollow the tweeter for a period of time. And I do this even when I’m interested in the topic–I’d rather read something longer and thought out about the topic than a bunch of rapid fire nibbles of information with no bigger context mixed in with everything else I’m reading.

By: efergus3

efergus3 — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Soooooooo funny.

By: smut clyde

smut clyde — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:42:00 +0000

I was in the UK, living largely on a diet of meat pies and hamburgers, in the late 1980s, and so far so erkwnsvcsetcnnz ,,sw

By: TheMadLibrarian

TheMadLibrarian — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:08:00 +0000

Let’s compare lifespans in both Japan and the US for people on comparable diets. There are too many variables otherwise.

By: carolin shining

carolin shining — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:33:00 +0000

The wonderful Canadian show “Regensis” had a plot line surrounding prion disease in Season 1, episode 4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ReGenesis_episodes
The characters are all employees of “NORBAC”, a fictional entity that investigates all kinds of biological epidemiological threats to North America. Awesome show.

By: Ron Georg

Ron Georg — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:19:00 +0000

That could account for the historic comparison, but it doesn’t explain the geographic discrepancy. Life expectancy in Japan, a culture fond of rice and veggies, is about five years longer than in the U.S., but Alzheimer’s rates are ten times higher in the States, where there’s a cheeseburger on every corner.

By: oneswellfoop

oneswellfoop — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Well, my last comment was apparently deleted, so: If you find it useful, good for you. While the tweets get an A for brevity, they get an F for clarity. It should have been apparent from the nature, length, and complexity of the material that 148 characters at a time would be insufficient to communicate it. If you need a post-mortem to tell you that, then….good luck or something.

By: jandrese

jandrese — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:49:00 +0000

I’ve always thought of prion diseases as a whole class of diseases. Basically misfolded proteins that can catalyze other proteins to refold in the same shape that cause your body to slowly disintegrate. The high lethality and poor inter-species communicability (it only works on one specific protein that may or may not exist) has always been the limiting factor in their spread.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are countless numbers of prion type diseases out there that we have never detected because they only affect one person or animal at a time and don’t spread, and also because we don’t have a good way to test for them.

Since I read about them, it also suggests an evolutionary reason for the predisposition against cannibalism.

By: efergus3

efergus3 — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Lived in Ely, England, ’87 to ’90. So far so good.

By: jandrese

jandrese — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:42:00 +0000

That reads to me like “we don’t have a good test for this stuff, so we are going to err on the side of caution and say it might still be unsafe.”

By: Reg Robson

Reg Robson — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:39:00 +0000

I’m thinking just correlation not causation. The advent of refrigeration also led to longer lifespans due to generally better kept food. It could simply be that many people didn’t get old enough before refrigeration to get Alzheimer’s in the numbers we’ve seen over the last 70 years or so.

By: Marc Mielke

Marc Mielke — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:11:00 +0000

“Our Town” It actually tried really hard to use every cannibalism meme available at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town_(The_X-Files)

By: Øyvind

Øyvind — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Articles like this was, and still is, the reason why I read BB every day. Also, only tangentially related; I think kuru was either mentioned or used as basis for an episode of X-files once upon a time.

By: Jim Jones

Jim Jones — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:46:00 +0000

I’m actually fascinated by this because of the restrictions that the national blood supply puts on people who were stationed (or family members living with a person stationed) in some European countries during the 1980s during the Mad Cow outbreak. We lived in Germany, one of the countries listed.

I’ve grown up in a military household that saw giving blood as part of your civic duty. My father has a rare blood type and would receive calls whenever there was a blood drive in his unit or on the post where we were stationed. MANY people, at least at that time, in the military donate blood.

So, when I graduated high school and moved back to the US, I would give blood whenever I heard about blood drives in my community. Skip forward a few years, and one of the screening questions asked if potential donors had lived in Europe in the late 1980s. I didn’t think anything of it until, the person running the drive pulled me aside and said that that question disqualified and would continue to disqualify me for the foreseeable future. That was in the mid 1990s and I (nor my father, nor MANY active duty and retired military) have been able to give blood since.

I’ve brought this up to a number of doctors and some of them weren’t even aware of the restriction.

Check out the “In-Depth Discussion of Variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease and Blood Donation” section of the Red Cross Blood Donation Eligibility requirements page: http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requirements/eligibility-criteria-alphabetical-listing#arc5 The few that were aware of it thought that is was odd that the ban was still in effect, but, as Maggie pointed out, there is no test for the disease and there as so many unknowns about incubation times that the Red Cross (and other blood banks) can’t take the risk.

As a result, I’ve followed lots of the general news, watched a few documentaries, and paid attention to popular science coverage of the topic. When I started hearing reports of CWD, it freaked me out.Anyway, I thought you all might be interested in how the US blood supply, at least, is already addressing prion diseases (or the potential for them) in its policies.