Die out. Look at the weather patterns. We done fucked up.

Afaik it's because they naturally die before the disease becomes crippling. Or it becomes crippling around or after the normal lifespan of the animal. It doesn't mean they aren't affected, it means it doesn't affect them before they would normally die...

Please don't anthropomorphize "mother nature". Mother nature doesn't think, or make decisions, it is a natural progression of life and death... There is a process and a cycle to much of it, hand waving "mother nature finds a way" ignores and dismisses the reality of it, and excludes the science that helps us understand how our world actually works.

Deer can and do eat meat when available

The problem is that the brain is the part you want to splatter all over the Italian marble floors of their mansions.

New plan live butchering so that the brain and spine is still intact and no need to worry about Mad Bougie disease.

Reminds me of train to busan because of the opening lol

Interesting, I didn't know prions lasted so long on bare soil. I don't imagine it's a simple thing for a prion to jump from animal to animal though. Certainly not any less complex than jumping to humans? Right?

The mill I work at schedules their yearly maintenance around hunting season. First week both mills are down. Second week half and half.

Easy 80% of staff are gone hunting.

I say this as someone who regularly eats venison and lives in a place where it's relatively common as well but it still isn't nearly as threatening as something like mad cow. Pretty much everyone eats beef.

It's a lot easier to tell people don't eat venison you hunted and contain it than it is halt the entire beef industry and tag everyone who may have eaten it yk?

I'm not saying it wouldn't be bad, only that we've been through much worse as far as prions go and one like this would be relatively speaking, less of a threat

Consider just eating, you know, cow, or only venison from a trusted source.

Preferably the person that shot and had it butchered.

Eat the person who shot the deer? Dang that's some extreme veganism.

There’s also the option of just not eating venison if you’re really worried.

The issue is that deer dont eat each other often enough for that to be how they spread it among each other.

So whatever vector is moving it around in them, which we dont actually know yet, is the more likely risk of an actual jump. Cant not take a risk if you cant tell if its risky.

It's actually worse than a virus.

Once an environment is infected, the pathogen is extremely hard to eradicate. It can persist for years in dirt or on surfaces, and scientists report it is resistant to disinfectants, formaldehyde, radiation and incineration at 600C (1,100F).

Biologist here. That’s not where I’d put the association. I’m going to simplify things a bit because this is going to be a long post, but hopefully this will help.

I think you’re thinking about the effects of heat on proteins. We can destabilize macromolecules by heating them, sometimes causing permanent damage. That takes a lot of heat, though. The planet would be long dead before we had to worry about the environmental temperature denaturing proteins.

Biologist related joke: How do you unscramble an egg?
Feed it to a chicken.

So, when the microscope was invented, people were startled to discover what were obviously living organisms in a drop of pond water. Discovery led to discovery, and we ended up learning about bacteria and the germ theory of disease. Some bacteria are really good (in that without them you would die), and some are really bad (like if you get infected you could die), but most are neutral. I do not believe there’s any direct connection between the global temperature and the rate of mutation in bacteria. That’s not to say there’s not a connection between climate change and disease rates. I’ll talk about that later.

So later on we discovered viruses. Viruses are much smaller than bacteria. While a bacterium is a cell with a whole physiology going on, a virus consists of a bit of genetic material bound in an envelope of proteins. The envelope will gain access to a cell and inject its genetic material, which the cell’s normal processes will start to work on, producing more viruses. Many people don’t consider viruses “alive.” I do, because I’m approaching it from a different direction. Again, the rate of mutation there isn’t really directly affected by a rise in global temperature, but there is a disease rate relationship.

We only discovered prions more recently. They’re even more simple than viruses. They’re really just a protein. We don’t understand them very well yet. The danger comes from the fact that prions can force other proteins to become copies of themselves. They can cause things like mad cow disease. They’re incredibly hardy and don’t mutate faster because of climate change. They’re very scary diseases with no known treatment and in some cases unknown transmission paths.

This one is a prion.

I think we can find correlations between disease in animals and climate change. Climate change forces animals into new environments where they can encounter diseases they’ve never faced before and to which they’re susceptible.

Even more important is the common root cause of industrialization and human expansion and environmental destruction. Again, forcing more animals together magnifies the impact of communicable diseases, and things like the use of antibiotics to make factory farming as profitable as possible has the inevitable consequences of making diseases that are harder to treat.

Not this pathogen. Prions are not living organisms, not even as much as viruses, and are extremely resistant to both heat and cold. It's the same stuff that caused the mad cow disease in Britain.

And unfortunately I'm American

Here in Utah we have brine prions....er, shrimp. Commercially sold as Sea Monkeys. We have no need of these "brains" you speak of.

Yup. Just capitalism trying to save money on disposal fees while simultaneously making money selling infected shit as feed.

It can however totally spread from deer to person if we decide to eat it.

So basically treat it like mad cow disease and don't eat meat from dubious sources. Got it

So you are saying that the people infected with the zombie disease are all going to be cannibals? Somehow this doesn't sound like a good news.

That doesn't hold with prion diseases as they often lay dormant for years, and prions themselves are nigh indestructable, lasting for years or even decades in the environment

Prions are misfolded proteins - The diseases they cause are because they cause other proteins to break and misfold to match the prion, so the traditional biological machinery doesn't matter, just that a protein is close enough in shape to break and misfold in response

Any data to back up that 99%?

Says the one invoking infinity to support a juvenile argument, not unlike "saying 'nunh unh'". How apropos.

By this logic because there is infinite time and infinite possibilities, we could develop a cure or a virus that kills this prion and avert this crisis. We could also not and just die. Then there is a possibility that none of this exists and this is a simulation and the developers haven't added this as a feature yet.

On a finite world, full of life competing everywhere all the time? It's still a matter of chance if it would happen in infinite time

Most diseases die out

Good thing there isn't infinite time. Fun fact, at any point in time, a finite amount of time will have passed

I mean, if you look at what happened during the BSE outbreak in the UK, this is basically exactly what happened. There was a politician who even fed his 4 year old kid a burger on TV to show how perfectly safe the meat was.

The nice part about prion diseases is that the only thing those people will achieve is killing themselves off, unless you decide to start eating their corpses