Mad Cow Anyone? ...Cells Can Cure Themselves of Prions

a reply to: rickymouse

you say:

...prions... can be destroyed by causing apoptosis by stimulating specific immune system response aided by enzymes and other means.

Sorry. Anyone selling "enzymes or other means" to destroy prions in the body is just a scam artist. Taking such things won't work, and might hurt you.

It has long been known that prions adapt and evolve to infect new proteins (and cells) - but public health agencies have been slow to admit the implications. So this news release is a bit surprising:

Scrapie from sheep could infect humans with 'mad cow disease', study finds

Tests find a link between the infectious agent behind scrapie with fatal human brain disease, sporadic CJD, which caused major health scare in 1990s

….“There are existing measures in place to ensure that any clinically affected animals with this disease are not able to enter the food chain. …"

originally posted by: Tardacus
If the amyloids are in blood ....

Interesting idea! Sorry I missed it. ...But just so you know, the amyloids tend to collect in soft tissue (excepting in multiple myeloma blood cancer). Also, dialysis actually causes a form of amyloidosis called Dialysis-related amyloidosis (DRA).

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

....That's the conundrum - how can you use fever to kill prions when prions use fever to spread?

Maybe I am missing something... What does it matter if the fever causes prions to spread if the fever also kills the prions? Put another way, who cares where the prions are and where they are going when they have been "fixed" by the fever. By spread do you mean replicate?

a reply to: dbadbdc

originally posted by: dbadbdc

originally posted by: soficrow
a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

....That's the conundrum - how can you use fever to kill prions when prions use fever to spread?

Maybe I am missing something...

"Mad Cow" Disease Uses Immune System to Spread in Body

One assumption lies at the root of efforts to keep the meat we eat safe from mad cow disease: that tissues beyond an animal's brain, spinal cord and immune system are free of the prions that cause the disease.

(Now) Researchers have found that if an animal falls ill with another infection, its immune response can carry large numbers of prions to organs throughout its body. ..."The rules no longer apply," warns pathologist Adriano Aguzzi at Zurich University Hospital, Switzerland, who led the research.

(Aguzzi and his team) took mice with the equivalent of BSE and induced an 'inflammatory response' in them. This is the type of immune response that the body mounts in the face of a wide range of injuries and illnesses, including cuts, the common cold and type I diabetes.

There was an explosion of prions in the animals' pancreases, kidneys and livers, the researchers report in this week's issue of Science1. The amount of prions in these organs was just as high as is generally found in diseased spleens.

"If the animal has an additional infection in the body, the prions are no longer confined to the areas where they normally are," explains Surachai Supattapone, an expert in infectious diseases at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire. ...The researchers believe that the cells involved in the inflammatory response somehow help the prions to replicate, and to spread to the parts of the body being targeted by the immune reaction.