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Airborne Prions Prove Lethal In Mouse Studies

Posted by Soulskill on from the denny-crane dept.

sgunhouse writes "Wired has a story up on the lethality of airborne prions. It should be noted that prions (which cause 'mad cow disease' and similar disorders) are not normally airborne, and take a long time to kill the infected animal, but so far are 100% lethal if something else doesn't kill the animal first. So, they are not likely to be useful as a biological weapon (my first thought when reading their headline), but they present another safety precaution to consider."

3 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Prions straddle living/non living gap by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Prions are strange in the sense, they are almost on the dividing line between living and non living. They have no DNA/RNA, no need to breath or even to eat, but they replicate that makes them different from venom and poison. How long do the exist in prion form left to themselves I wonder. Can they exist in some dried powder form forever? Or do they spontaneously disintegrate into constituent compounds?

    Leather tanning industry has some really weird mix of chemicals and some of them involve brain matter. Hope the left over prions on the leather jackets degrade or wear off.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  2. Who the F^-* ?? by gr8_phk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Who would even do an experiment with such things?

    1. Re:Who the F^-* ?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Who would even do an experiment with such things?

      People who then know more than those that don't bother checking. Tribes with this characteristic are thought to optimize their use of limit resources slightly over people who would never think to check for themselves.

      One could call them ... winners.