68
Study: Hunters Die After Consuming CWD-Infected Venison
(www.yahoo.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
68 points (100.0% liked)
news
23517 readers
581 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
cwd isn't a virus, it doesn't mutate, it's prions
True that it's not a virus but prions can mutate in the sense that they are just proteins like any other, produced according to their genes. The gene coding for the prion protein can mutate, producing a prion that is better at making, e.g., the human analog fold into a prion.
sure the coding gene can mutate but there's no feedback mechanism to make this more likely as the disease spreads like with a virus.
Sure but the OP is correct.
They aren't produced according the their genes. They don't affect DNA like viruses do. They are a removed lower energy configuration of a protein. When the removed protein bumps into a healthy form of itself, the forces between the molecules pull the healthy protein into the prion shape. Then they go their separate ways, exponentially eating holes through tissues.
The protein targeted by CWD is different in cervids, it has like an extra loop that is important for its function. So if a CWD prion bumps into the human version of the protein, nothing happens. But, if some weird interaction allowed it to actually work, it's feasible a human prion could be created.
Prions are just proteins that can fold in a way that self-propagates by causing other instances of the same (or very similar) protein to also misfold the same way. This is how they cause infectious disease. The downstream impacts vary because it depends on what the misfolded protein actually does in addition to helping other instances misfold. Most often it just accumulates, avoiding destruction by the cell's usual mechanisms of destroying misfolded proteins (most prions that can't avoid this would be destroyed before we could even notice their existence). But even just accumulating a bunch of a prion can be devastating, as their mass can be disruptive and the actual functional amount of the normally folded protein becomes effectively nil.
But like all proteins, they are indeed still produced according to their genes. Proteins are generated through the transcription and translation processes.