I think there's a mistake in the article, her website goes into more detail:
https://soutien-a-emilie0.webnode.fr/lhistoire/ (gtranslate)
> Emilie is therefore working that day on samples of mice infected with strains of human prions. It is important to stress here that these were human strains and not animal strains, the species barrier no longer protecting, the infectivity of the pathogens handled by Emilie was therefore total.
(In case anyone else wanted to double-check the translation.)
> The scientific community has long recognized that handling prions is dangerous and an occupational risk for neuropathologists, says neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of the University of Zurich. Aguzzi declined to comment on the French CJD cases, but told Science his lab never handles human or bovine prions for research purposes, only for diagnostics. “We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have never been shown to be infectious to humans,” Aguzzi says. In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols, at least in mice, which “may warrant re-thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic laboratories,” they wrote. Aguzzi says he was “totally shocked” by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little attention elsewhere.
Take a look at this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_inflammatory_neu...
This disease was discovered due to an alert translator (most likely translating from Spanish to English) recalling that he had seen patients’ records before that had the nearly the same exact history.
After investigation, it was discovered the patients worked in a slaughterhouse near the pig brain section, where the brains were being aerosolized. Many ended up developing a progressive inflammatory neuropathy.
A human has a fully developed adult brain around age 25, but for some people it is not until age 30 [1].
[1] https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain?rebelltitem=1#re...
Her finger most likely got lanced, by a very thin forcep tip. It was never about “severing”.
"The thumb should have been soaked in a bleach solution immediately, which did not happen, [the family's lawyer] adds"
> In a 2011 paper, his team reported that prions can spread through aerosols, at least in mice, which “may warrant re-thinking on prion biosafety guidelines in research and diagnostic laboratories,” they wrote. Aguzzi says he was “totally shocked” by the finding and introduced safety measures to prevent aerosol spread at his own lab, but the paper drew little attention elsewhere.
...
> The government inspectors' report concluded that Jaumain’s accident was not unique, however. There had been at least 17 accidents among the 100 or so scientists and technicians in France working with prions in the previous decade, five of whom stabbed or cut themselves with contaminated syringes or blades. Another technician at the same lab had a fingerprick accident with prions in 2005, but has not developed vCJD symptoms so far, Bensimhon says.
Who knows really. 10 years is a long time to wait and worry, but it can take up to 50 years to express itself. Just imagine spending your whole life worrying about this.
Wikipedia thinks otherwise.
The whole UK population was eating mad cow for years until humans started dying.
It was well known in advance that this was a crazy callous risk taken by uk.gov
Careful what you read, the UK spend a lot of money on propaganda at the time (to support beef exports) until the case was well and truly lost.
The prion protein is expressed in the central nervous system, which isn't legal for human consumption. Also, ingestion of meat exposes it to stomach acid and digestive enzymes before it gets into the consumer's circulation -- enzymes that break down foreign proteins into (harmless) amino acids.
In contrast, accidentally injecting yourself with material from an infected brain is about the most direct possible infection route.
Source? I've seen calf brain on the menu plenty of times.
(Source: I live here, I'm old enough to remember it dominating the news cycle for months.)
The ban was introduced on December 16, 1997, after government advisers reported small risks that small nerve endings near beef bones and bone marrow might be infective. The ban included cuts such rib roasts and oxtail, as well as soups and stock cubes made in Britain from beef bones.
The ban was lifted Tue 29 Nov 1999, but other bans on using as food more risky parts of cattle - brain, eyes, tonsils, spinal cord, spleen and intestines - remained in force, as did ban on use of bones in manufactured food and cattle more than 30 months old are banned from the food chain.
Things have been eased further since 1999 but I'm not sure we can get brain on the menu in the UK...
Making it a inheritable desease that can afflict others?
Émilie Jaumain - the person refered to in your first quoted paragraph - worked at INRAE and the lab there works on prions that can infect humans. She cut her finger, and became infected.
Adriano Aguzzi's lab at the University of Zurich is the one that only works on mouse-adapted sheep prions. Presumably a similar accident wouldn't be possible there.
Scientists make mistakes all the time. They're human.
Imagine all of the mistakes you make in your job. Outages. Stupid bugs. It's the same with any profession.
> intentionally crafted bioweapon
they didn't mention anything about that anywhere.
Just because you’ve never tried it doesn’t mean you have shown something.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...
For example dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's head has never been shown to cause injury. We've dropped a 26.3 and a 29.5, but we've never studied dropping 27.4 kg - and as a result, "dropping a 27.4 kg ball on someone's head has never been shown to cause injury".
Frequently "never been shown" its used as a weasely way of saying "we've never looked at", or "we don't know if"
So one that is almost certain to happen given some time?
>The only way you can say something is never something is if you understand all occurrences of it;
"Understanding all occurences of it" seems like a good criterion for allowing potentially mass murderous work or not. That said, it sounds stricter than what it is. We just need them to know how a thing works and not be doing "sorcerer's apprentices" style peek and poke work.
They don't need to "prove a negative". For example we don't asks scientists to prove that "water can't explode and destroy the earth" to let them work with it casually. It's enough that they know it well. Do they know prion as well as they do water?
A portmanteau word is similar to a contraction, but contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not to make don't, whereas a portmanteau is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a single concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau
"Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog" in sentences that accept the accretions, whereas you could swap "prion" for "protein infection".
"Motel" and "fog" are portmanteaus, because you
wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"
"Motel" and "smog" are portmanteaus, because you
wouldn't put "motor hotel" or "smoke fog"(Aside from actual domain experts in this thread saying it is an infection, that is).
Is the difference between an infection and poisoning replication?
Whether they self-replicate or not is sort of a semantic issue. They replicate in the same way "fallen-down dominos" replicate.
Prior to being a prion, they are an already complex protein, but by folding a particular way, they become a prion, which causes other proteins of the same type to fold similarly.
Infectious disease is also called transmissible diseases. Infectious microorganism or agent can be a virus, bacterium, protozoan, prion, viroid, or fungus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Prion_replication
There is a complex dependence on forming fibres that makes them slow (long lead time to symptoms) and then fast (dead soon after getting sick).
"long period of uncertainty began on 31 May 2010, when she stabbed her left thumb with a curved forceps while cleaning a cryostat—a machine that can cut tissues at very low temperatures—that she used to slice brain sections from transgenic mice infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE. She pierced two layers of latex gloves and drew blood"
Later in the article:
""We conduct research only on mouse-adapted sheep prions, which have never been shown to be infectious to humans,” Aguzzi [neuropathologist at the University of Zurich] says."
It sounds like the assumption that mouse-adapted sheep prions can't infect humans may be flawed.