Scientists at UCSF have created synthetic prions — tiny protein particles — and shown they can cause brain disease in laboratory animals and replicate without any genetic material inside them.
[…]
As part of the new study, Prusiner, Legname and their colleagues created a large fragment of a normal prion protein and folded it using lab techniques into an abnormal shape, which they suspected would give it the infectious properties of the faulty proteins.
Then they injected the faulty prion fragments into the brains of mice that had been genetically engineered to produce copious quantities of normal prions.
In little more than a year, the first of the genetically engineered lab mice developed typical prion brain disease, and by the end of two years, all the mice in the colony contracted the same disease.
The researchers then took brain tissue from one of the sick mice and inoculated normal wild-type mice with an extract of the tissue. In less than six months, these mice, too, developed brain disease, Prusiner and his colleagues reported.
A little more work on the delivery system, and a whole new class of bioweapons springs into existance. And highly durable ones – as was discovered to the dismay of the cattle industry, prions aren’t even destroyed by normal rendering processes.
Nice.
Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam
The question is what sort of effect does someone want with a biological weapon: immediate fear and panic or long-term actual deaths who might not even be traceable. Latency of a year would be pretty long for a biological weapon.
PS: and the study subjects were artificially induced to produce large amounts of normal prions for the pathological prions to work with. Normally, there’d be less normal prions and it would therefore take more than one year of latency for symptoms to kick in.
Not that I’m dismissing the possibility, but this is a threat that acts differently than most other potential bio-warfare agents, and would therefore be used with some sort of very unconventional strategy, if used at all.
Place it in the context of terrorist strikes that are years in the making – and the reaction in the public to clusters of prion diseases suddenly being diagnosed.
I realize the initial group were genetically modified – the part that caught my eye were the “wild type” who were subsequently infected and developed disease.
An al Qaeda type might see this technique as an ideal way to cause harm to hordes of infidels: contaminate non-halal meats (especially pork) and wait for the will of Allah to take its course.
Perhaps a prion bioweapon has already been used. This might explain Bush Derangement Syndrome. When I start thinking I’m to blame for Islamofascist anger, I’ll know I’m infected too.