Like CJD, why haven’t we developed treatments so the disease isn’t a death sentence?
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Prions basically self-replicate by changing the shape of other proteins, and they’re also really hard to deal with because prions are really, really small. They’re smaller than a virus, to put things into perspective. The immune systems struggles to “latch on” to something that small, which makes finding and destroying prions difficult. It’s easy for the prion to keep self-replicating while the immune system only slowly destroys the prions that it can find, which means that replication of the prion can out-pace the destruction, and the prion goes out of control.
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