Vcjd Time Bomb?

[chronyx]

Read a piece in the newspaper a few days ago about vCJD. I remember writing a paper for college on BSE over 10 years ago and being fascinated by prion-based disease - prions aren't virus or bacteria, not even alive. Hence very hard to destroy.

But they still seem to have an 'incubation' period of up to 60 years.

For a time they would have been present in food, vaccines, blood donations, surgical instruments, butchers tools.......

Not sure what the purpose of this thread is but it's more interesting than house prices and there's some reet clever folk on here...

[fluffy666]

Read a piece in the newspaper a few days ago about vCJD. I remember writing a paper for college on BSE over 10 years ago and being fascinated by prion-based disease - prions aren't virus or bacteria, not even alive. Hence very hard to destroy.

But they still seem to have an 'incubation' period of up to 60 years.

For a time they would have been present in food, vaccines, blood donations, surgical instruments, butchers tools.......

Not sure what the purpose of this thread is but it's more interesting than house prices and there's some reet clever folk on here...

Cases are dropping. Think of it like hearing a few bangs in the night, and waking up to find a dozen bullet holes in your pillow.

It was a horribly close thing. Most people were exposed. Not quite at the level required, it seems.

Unless a second wave starts up, of course.

[chronyx]

Cases are dropping. Think of it like hearing a few bangs in the night, and waking up to find a dozen bullet holes in your pillow.

It was a horribly close thing. Most people were exposed. Not quite at the level required, it seems.

Unless a second wave starts up, of course.

I hope you're right! Apparently though there is a big push to have it diagnosed as Alzheimer's or psychological illness depending on the symptoms.

[fluffy666]

I hope you're right! Apparently though there is a big push to have it diagnosed as Alzheimer's or psychological illness depending on the symptoms.

Well, if it was only emerging in the elderly and looked like a form of Alzhiemers's we'd be OK.

I'm not sure you could hide a large scale epidemic in the 40-60 age group..

It is pretty awful to imagine the consequences had it been a bit more infectious.

http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/

[interestrateripoff]

During the original scare wasn't it said it would be about 20 - 25 years before everyone got ill?

[petetong]

Yep, definitely possible that there could be a lot more cases. They have projected up to 1000 cases from blood transfusions:

http://news.sky.com/story/1084406/blood-transfusions-could-spark-cjd-deaths

Guardian article

The amount of infective dose in a blood transfusion is high unsurprisingly but they think that since they started leucodepletion, removing white blood cells, that has been reduced. The people who got it from transfusions developed it in only a relative few years.

Then you have the fact that all the deaths so far have been in people with 1 genotype, there are 3 possible genotypes, 40%, 40%,20% population split roughly. Seems to me they don't know whether only people with that genotype will get it or as seems to be what is currently thought it will take longer for it to show up in the other genotype populations.

[The Knimbies who say No]

During the original scare wasn't it said it would be about 20 - 25 years before everyone got ill?

Iirc, the incubation period was a key uncertainty, and crucial to the number of cases expected. The worst case scenario for numbers of expected cases involved a long incubation period assumption, the implication being that the cases recorded at the time were the very tail end of an extremely large mountain of cases. If the incubation period was much shorter, the observed cases would represent a greater fraction of the total expected. Media latched on to the longest incubation assumptions as it gave the most dramatic predicted consequences.

Think of it like this: Blindfolded, you climb up three stairs, and are trying to work out how many more stairs you have to climb before reaching the top. You have to make a best guess regarding where you are on your journey, since whether you are at home or in a Cathedral will have a dramatic effect on the number of stairs you have left to climb. While you cannot exclude the possibility you are in a cathedral, it's perhaps not the likliest scenario. If that makes sense.

[StainlessSteelCat]

Cases are dropping. Think of it like hearing a few bangs in the night, and waking up to find a dozen bullet holes in your pillow.

It was a horribly close thing. Most people were exposed. Not quite at the level required, it seems.

Unless a second wave starts up, of course.

My thoughts exactly. Combination of getting lucky, plus media scare stories. I have a friend whose convinced his Dad died of it a few years ago. The symptoms were similar, but no conclusive diagnosis.

You'll never catch me eating meat again though. The mainstream food chain is still horribly complex and therefore has plenty of scope of hiding bad behaviour.

[interestrateripoff]

Think of it like this: Blindfolded, you climb up three stairs, and are trying to work out how many more stairs you have to climb before reaching the top. You have to make a best guess regarding where you are on your journey, since whether you are at home or in a Cathedral will have a dramatic effect on the number of stairs you have left to climb. While you cannot exclude the possibility you are in a cathedral, it's perhaps not the likliest scenario. If that makes sense.

And walking up stairs blindfolded gives you Vcjd?

[dubs]

My daughter is a public health scientist and she told me a few months ago that a blood test developed early this year has been used to secretly test between 30,000 and 40,000 people from NHS blood samples to see how many people are silent carriers.

The results have scared many of the scientist with the accepted figure being between 30,000 and 60,000 people infected and now more work is done to try and find a treatment. There is hope of the horizon as a cure has been shown to work on mice and human testing may begin next year

[petetong]

My daughter is a public health scientist and she told me a few months ago that a blood test developed early this year has been used to secretly test between 30,000 and 40,000 people from NHS blood samples to see how many people are silent carriers.

The results have scared many of the scientist with the accepted figure being between 30,000 and 60,000 people infected and now more work is done to try and find a treatment. There is hope of the horizon as a cure has been shown to work on mice and human testing may begin next year

30,000 - 60,000 out of the total population or a smaller sample ?

[dubs]

30,000 - 60,000 out of the total population or a smaller sample ?

Out of the total population, but the ratio does vary depending on age groups. There are two major concerns at the moment:

1. Because there is a high risk of passing on this infection to siblings, through blood and by contaminated surgical implements. Just 0.2 grammes of infected material is known to cause infection through digestion....so highly infectious.

2. There has been an unexplained increase in sCJD and there is now credible evidence that MadCows Disease is also responsible for sCJD as well as cJD. If this is the case there we are now talking about a much larger figure as these would not have been picked up by the blood sample.

We now have a serious serious problem, a disease that is infectious and is now endemic to the UK

[chronyx]

We now have a serious serious problem, a disease that is infectious and is now endemic to the UK

BTL?

(Thanks for the detailed info)

[Steppenpig]

i heard a report just the other day, that more people have died from drinking scented oils (not sure if they're for burning or massaging) than from vcjd.

[sorry, no more details]

[dubs]

i heard a report just the other day, that more people have died from drinking scented oils (not sure if they're for burning or massaging) than from vcjd.

[sorry, no more details]

That is probably the case, but diseases like these are capable of becoming really problematic. The threat is serious enough to warrant the official secrets act, much of the data you simply can't get access to it.

[swissy_fit]

In Switzerland (and France I think) you can't donate filthy English blood if you lived in the UK between two dates (forget the details but basically the 80s and 90s) for more than a few months and were not vegetarian at the time.

When I pointed out that Switzerland had the second largest number of BSE cases during that period, they were surprised, it's not widely known here.

[bendy]

My thoughts exactly. Combination of getting lucky, plus media scare stories. I have a friend whose convinced his Dad died of it a few years ago. The symptoms were similar, but no conclusive diagnosis.

You'll never catch me eating meat again though. The mainstream food chain is still horribly complex and therefore has plenty of scope of hiding bad behaviour.

Why only meat?

[Hail the Tripod]

prions aren't virus or bacteria, not even alive. Hence very hard to destroy.

Quite hard to definitively show to exist.

[chronyx]

Quite hard to definitively show to exist.

Yes it's more to do with the 'misfolding' of proteins I believe, bit sketchy on the details now.

[fluffy666]

Yes it's more to do with the 'misfolding' of proteins I believe, bit sketchy on the details now.

Yes, the concept is that a protein becomes mis-folded, and the mis-folded state catalyzes other proteins of the same formula to misfold.

Seems that the mis-folded state is very stable with regards to heat and proteases, so it can survive the digestive system.

[Dorkins]

Out of the total population, but the ratio does vary depending on age groups. There are two major concerns at the moment:

1. Because there is a high risk of passing on this infection to siblings, through blood and by contaminated surgical implements. Just 0.2 grammes of infected material is known to cause infection through digestion....so highly infectious.

Did you and your siblings used to play My Little Blood Transfusion or take turns surgically removing each other's body parts and eating them?