[chrbarrol]

Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon? It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions and have a close to 100% death-rate without anyone noticing until many years after the contamination started.

Imaging contaminating food/drinking water with the Prion which causes Kuru [1] for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

[overlordalex]

I've always thought a _very_ effective strategy would be to get a crop-duster and spray a prion-contaminated mist over a major city, basically contaminating every public surface in a large area

I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards - do you remove the surface of everything in your city?

To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale, think about the terrorism aspect - imagine not being able to interact with any surface? It would be like a permanent covid lockdown on the area

The psychological effect of a large-scale area-denial would be massive

[dnautics]

It's not really effective because it takes years to manifest symptoms of prion disease. Terrorism usually has a message attached to it, and "you're gonna start dying in 10 years" is not conducive to messaging.

[chrbarrol]

It is true that hiding it for many years would make it less attractive for terrorists, however one could imagine another strategy where you wait 12 months before anonymously telling the authorities you did it, without telling them how. (While threatening to do it again)

Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You could probably keep the attack going for at least a year before authorities get their act together, all the while people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to know how the original group got infected a year earlier if you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination even if the specific product is found)

[XorNot]

Authorities are really good at de-anonymizing anonymous messengers. Who have no incentive to spread an unverified rumor they can't prove.

[da_big_ghey]

living with knowing that i probably have 10 yrs before die in a gruesom neurodegeneration, knowing that if i interact much with our world that maybe i spread this to others, seriously terrifying, depressing, would induce misery.

[dnautics]

I'm not disputing that. (also, prions aren't really human-to-human contagious, unless you're into eating your friends' brains or swapping syringes)

[Dah00n]

It would make it much easier to get away with than bombs and spread way more fear. If it would work (I have no idea) it would be a very intelligent choice of weapon.

[medstrom]

In this case I guess the message targets people in other cities than the doomed one. "This could happen to your city too".

[BoxOfRain]

Wouldn't an entire city being sprayed with prions be a fairly apocalyptic event in and of itself? Those prions aren't going to go away, they'll get blown about and distributed by the millions of cars, buses, and trains going in and out of the city. What can you realistically do about that, go full Imperial Inquisition and raze the entire section of the country to the ground?

[dnautics]

honestly, I doubt it. Prions do go away, exposure to oxidizing acids (nitrous, sulfuric), oxidizers like car exhaust ozone, sunlight probably damages them, random environmental proteases that are extremely hardy (because they are designed to work outside)... Also we don't really know of a way to make large volumes of prions; IIRC nobody has made a de novo infective prion, you could seed a folded prion protein to become infective prion using a biological source, but that level of biotech requires a significant lab with large-scale fermentation, or I suppose you could just grow flocks of sheep or cattle and harvest their brains, that would probably get noticed too.

We also don't really know what the population penetrance of prion is. It's possible, for something like british mad cow disease, basically everyone got exposed, but only some people got sick due to a random high infectious load, or a weakened capability of the body to clear the prion...

There are proteases in the body that are capable of clearing amyloid forms (insulin-degrading enzyme, e.g.) and it would be hard to believe that for a sufficiently small dose it wouldn't get cleared before it got to the brain.

strange, I just looked it up, but no one has investigated if increasing IDE expression in mice has a protective effect against prpSc infection (when the infection is not administered directly to the brain)... If there are any prion researchers here... Might be an interesting experiment.

[dnautics]

you'd still have to wait a decade after the first attack to make threats on the second city.

[medstrom]

I think reading about prions is the scary part, no need to wait for the deaths.

[dnautics]

feel free to experiment with terrorism establishing credibility using a different psychological model. I, personally, won't.

[dotcommand]

> Has there been any research on Prions as a bio-terrorism weapon?

All such research has dual military-civilian usages. Similar to how all nuclear energy research has nuclear weapons implications. All space/rocket research has icbm implications.

As a matter of fact, all nuclear energy, space activity, etc by all nations are tied explicitly or implicitly to the military/defense.

It's why when our "enemies" ramp up on nuclear energy or space research, we ( the government and our media ) complain. It's also why we keep tabs on such research by our "allies" as well.

If any major nation is researching something, my guess is that they are also researching how to weaponize it and defend from it.

[ekianjo]

if you want to kill lots people thats pretty much the worst way of doing it.

[mschuster91]

The definition of terrorism is "inciting fear", not necessarily "kill thousands". A million people afraid if they caught BSE/cow madness is definitely hitting that definition, especially as the stuff can't be tested for... people exposed to prions will have that sword hanging over their neck for the rest of their lives, and the affected area will be out of order for years.

To this day, many countries ban all people who lived in the UK between 1980-1996 from donating blood (https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/bse-nachwirkungen-blut-spend...) simply because of that fear.

[Omavel]

bio-terrorism is not effective.

[tyingq]

What's "effective" mean in this context? The anthrax letters in the US in 2001 certainly dominated news cycles.

[ekianjo]

And killed very few people. That's what we call terrorism (lots of news coverage for very few deaths) - it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles.

[emptyfile]

>it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles.

That's literally the desired effect. What you're thiking of is war.

[ekianjo]

I was referring to the original comment above:

> It sounds like you could infect thousands/millions

Its not the right way to infect millions of people. It does not scale. Therefore not effective.

[Dah00n]

> it's not effective in doing anything but news cycles.

"The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims" is a definition of terrorism. Death count is irrelevant (outside of spreading fear itself). Zero deaths in a terrorist attack could still be a very effective attack. Spreading something that causes a hideous disease in a city and causing mass hysteria could be an excellent terrorist tactic. Likely better than a bomb that kills a few people.

[triceratops]

"Terror" is the point of "terrorism". It's in the word.

[inglor_cz]

Point of terrorism is achieving a political change through terror. Terror is not the end in itself.

From this point of view, mailing of anthrax in 2001 was very inefficient.

[jessaustin]

We need to expand the set of possible actors and goals. The anthrax campaign happened immediately after 9/11. The result of the campaign was the end of effective political opposition to the massive expansion of military and "secret" aspects of the USA government made possible by 9/11. Cui bono? Certainly not the several implausible patsies the authorities immediately had lined up to blame.

Numerous USA calamities make a lot more sense when we study them with an eye toward who benefits rather than who is blamed.

[Dah00n]

What made 9/11 such a successful terrorist attack was that it made the US live in fear. That is a change (and it hasn't changed back). Terror (fear) is a perfectly fine end in itself for terrorism.

The anthrax mailing caused changes and fear in US society with very little work. That sounds like a very efficient terrorist attack IMO.

[ekianjo]

Terror only propagates through mass media. Mass media is the issue.

[PKop]

Given that an attack of this sort would be propagated through mass media, then the claim that the attack would be ineffective is wrong.

[tyingq]

5 envelopes, 5 dead, 17 more infected.

[myWindoonn]

The most effective bioterror attack in the USA was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... and it killed zero people, affecting 751 people in total. Bioterror is expensive and difficult.

For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment. Spray them onto crops? Crops and soil are covered in small bugs and microbes which break down anything too long, including proteins and carbohydrate chains. No, in order to have prions in the food supply, you need something like cannabalistic cow-raising practices or other ways of recycling prions in a wet+hot safe environment.

[Marsymars]

> For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment.

How does this jive with the seemingly extreme difficulty of effective sterilization of prion-contaminated objects?

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/32/9/1348/291736

[Dah00n]

>affecting 751 people in total.

That is not how terror is defined though. The amount affected by terrorism is the amount of people that get terrorised by the act, not the amount that gets sick, dies or know someone who did. Using your definition 9/11 only affected aprox. 10.000 people but in reality if cased mass hysteria and fear in the US (and elsewhere) that is still there today.

[Johnny555]

Can’t you just spray them into a hamburger meat grinder at a meat packing plant to protect the prions in beef? But it’d be a pretty ineffective terror attack if it takes 10 years for people to show symptoms… though that could also mean that attack was already made 5 years ago and we just don’t know yet.

[Apocryphon]

So you just inject them into the food supply?

[nabla9]

Terrorism that is effective is usually called warfare, genocide or something else.

[natmaka]

Indeed. http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-was-wrong/