Of course your Hospitals instruments are clean
Summary: This article is probably the scariest one you will ever read in your entire life and you may already be infected but wont know it for a decade or more. Although we spoke very little of prions this semester this sinister rogue protein is 100 % fatal in every case to date. Prions are proteins that are miss folded and have the ability cause other proteins to miss fold likewise. Most people recall the outbreaks of the so call MAD COW formally known as Creutzfeldt-jakob Disease and as soon as we forgot we ate hamburgers again but ingestion is not the only way to get a rogue prion. Prions once attached to surgical instruments are not killed by autoclave or harsh chemicals and can be passed on to the next patient. The article talks about several cases of such transmissions and the fact that the new CDC guidelines say to simple destroy the instruments after surgery. You can see how problematic this is when a patient is asymptomatic and a disease that can take up to a decade to manifest.
Connections: In class we talked a lot about how to kill microbes with heat, pressure, and chemicals. It’s terrifying to think bleach wont kill but that’s kind of the point of this article, but prions are not really alive anyway just a rogue proteins waiting to strike.
Critical analysis: I love this article and wish it would make the cable news networks but thats unlikely unless the D man tweets about it. Although the article is not in a journal but more of a fun to read type magazine, they do have a citation from the ” Acta Neuropathologica Communications” in which the journal article was published.
Question: How comfortable are you to have your next surgical procedure ?