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by sp332 3714 days ago
Well, some proteins are destroyed by heat, which is probably where the confusion comes from. That's why cooking meat changes its color and texture.
1 comments

"Denaturing" means to make the protein take on a different shape, which is all that is necessary (since a prion is the correct amino acids arranged in a pathological arrangement). You can denature proteins with heat or very high or low pH, depending on which protein that it is.
But the dangerous part of a prion is the way it's folded, right? All you have to do is denature it to render it harmless. It's just harder to do for some proteins than others.