I’ve read of accounts of “Kuru” and from what I’ve read the diseases caused by prions generally have a long incubation period, and that it can take a very singular prion to cascade into a complete disease.
In: Biology
Prions are scary stuff. We know how to kill bacteria, and we’re starting to get a handle on viruses. But prions straight up aren’t alive in the first place -they’re literally just snippets of protein that are folded the wrong way- and that makes them much harder to destroy. Ordinary disinfection and even cooking don’t work on them.
However, not being alive has its disadvantages. Because prions aren’t alive, they can’t respond to stimuli, and because of that, they can’t adapt to changes in their environment: they are what they are, and they can’t become anything else. And that means prions can’t evolve new ways to spread. They live in brain tissue and act on brain tissue, and to date the only known way for them to spread is through contact with brain tissue (or with things that have been in contact with brain tissue; prions being hard to destroy give them an advantage here). It’s very hard to make an epidemic happen under those conditions.
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