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by eganp
1875 days ago
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Dangerous? The hypothesized connection is not remotely clear. In vitro transformation of human PrP into PrP(Sc) by bovine PrP(Sc) is a necessary for the causal model. The fact that a strong species barrier exists, in vitro and in vivo, points towards a spurious association. It's understandable why one might infer from the correlation that there's a relationship but this is confounded by observation. The baseline expectation for CJD in a population is 1-2 cases/million [0]. vCJD cases in the UK never exceeded 30/yr [1, Fig 2. a]. Yes, vCJD occurs primarily in younger people - but that's circular as vCJD is defined as CJD-like disease with early onset. If cross-species transmission were common, one would expect a similar spike in age >40. The incidence of vCJD, even at its peak, was exceedingly rare. Many things, such as observation bias, pollution, or rare side-effects from faddish street drugs could be at fault here. It's tempting to jump to conclusions, a la "eating fats makes you fat," but it's totally unwarranted in the face of the in vitro and in vivo data demonstrating strong species barriers. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd/occurrence-transmission.html
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-020-02153-7 |
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