r/askscience • u/ProDidelphimorphiaXX • 9d ago

Biology How does nature deal with prion diseases?

Wasn’t sure what to flair.

Prion diseases are terrifying, the prions can trigger other proteins around it to misfold, and are absurdly hard to render inert even when exposed to prolonged high temperatures and powerful disinfectant agents. I also don’t know if they decay naturally in a decent span of time.

So… Why is it that they are so rare…? Nigh indestructible, highly infectious and can happen to any animal without necessarily needing to be transmitted from anywhere… Yet for the most part ecosystems around the world do not struggle with a pandemic of prions.

To me this implies there’s something inherent about natural environments that makes transmission unlikely, I don’t know if prion diseases are actually difficult to cross the species barrier, or maybe they do decay quite fast when the infected animal dies.

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u/The_Frostweaver 9d ago

I thought prions could survive for a a long time?

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u/ElysiX 9d ago

"A long time" is relative. Misfolded proteins are still proteins, and proteins rot.

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u/throwawaystedaccount 9d ago edited 8d ago

But isn't there an entire ecosystem of insects, rodents and scavengers that eat carcasses?

With so many different species feasting on that prion infected body, one would assume it would spread somewhat?

EDIT: Other answers in this thread clarify this to an extent.

EDIT2: Thank you for all the answers!

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u/LotusMoonGalaxy 9d ago

There was a paper published, I wanna say in the last 6 months, that found that cougars intestines were capable of destroying deer wasting disease prions. So in a "natural world", nature does have ways of preventing cross contamination in species. And that's just mammal to mammal predation. Insects and birds have different everything which again, would prevent cross species contamination. Part of the chronic wasting deer problem is that there isn't enough predation, enough food and overcrowding so deer are spreading it faster than prions usually spread.

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u/MATlad 8d ago

Looks like a few papers coming out of that research group!

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cougar+intestine+chronic+wasting+disease