[898] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
prions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (aeadams@MIT.EDU)
Sun Apr 7 23:11:42 1996
From: aeadams@MIT.EDU
To: vsg@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 07 Apr 1996 23:10:58 EDT
This is the deal with prions as far as I know:
It was not thought that proteins could be infectious until some
research was done on a few unexplained diseases, including those in
some canabalistic communities. In these peoples, there was a ritual
in which the brain of some unfortunate sacrifice(or maybe it was
a dead relative? I can't remember) was prepared by the women and then
eaten by the men. Many of the women got a strange affliction that
turned out to be caused by an infectious prion in the brain. Since
these women later may have been the sacrifices themselves, this
disease process continued. Scrapie was also found to be a prion, and this may have actually been the 1st to be discovered.
As far as I know regarding the sheep issue, since it is the brain
of the sheep that carries the infcetious particle, and the
cows were fed the brains, that is how the disease cylce goes, and
unless one deals with the sheep brain ( and maybe even only raw
sheep brain) one would not get a disease.But i am not 100% confident
that one can't get something for the sheep themselves.
AEA
