Prion Disease Redefines Neuroscience

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, an American neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing deadly prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in humans and will pose a considerable challenge to healthcare systems in the coming years,” Prusiner said. “Aggregation of the β-amyloid (Aβ) peptide within the brain is thought to be an initiating event in AD pathogenesis. Many recent studies in transgenic mice have provided evidence that Aβ aggregates become self-propagating (infectious) during disease, leading to a cascade of protein aggregation in the brain, which may underlie the progressive nature of AD. The ability to self-propagate and the existence of distinct strains reveals that Aβ aggregates exhibit many properties like prions (proteinaceous infectious particle). The evidence that Aβ can become a prion during disease, Aβ prions may be important for understanding the pathobiology of AD.”

Stanley Prusiner Nobel Prize prions

In June 2012, Prusiner confirmed that Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s and even ALS are prion diseases.

Other prion diseases include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in people, mad cow disease in livestock and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in wildlife. The variations in disease progression could be due to genetics in the patients or mutations in the prion, not different diseases entirely.

“This shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these two rogue proteins together destroy the brain,” said Stanley Prusiner, MD, the study’s senior author and director of the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, part of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “The fact that prion levels also appear linked to patient longevity should change how we think about the way forward for developing treatments for the disease. We need a sea change in Alzheimer’s disease research, and that is what this paper does. This paper might catalyze a major change in AD research.”

In 2019, Dr. Stanley Prusiner reconfirmed that Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are forms of prion disease;

The clinical name for prion disease is Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is “transmissible.”

Prion disease is a spectrum disease, where Alzheimer’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are on the same spectrum. The primary difference between these two forms of prion disease is that they attack the same region of the brain at different speeds. CJD is highly infectious and clearly mismanaged. The same can be said of Alzheimer’s disease since no one knows where along the spectrum the disease becomes infectious. Hospitals will dispose of equipment contaminated by CJD patients, while sending patients home to die, where they proceed to expose family and friends, while contaminating entire communities. CJD patients should be quarantined, but CJD isn’t even a reportable disease across the U.S. and most countries. Neurologists are just guessing when distinguishing between CJD and Alzheimer’s disease. Mismanagement of this entire spectrum is fueling a public health disaster;

Dr. Prusiner confirmed that Parkinson’s disease also is a prion disease. He confirmed that tau formations are aggregates of prions.

The primary difference between Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease is that the prions are destroying different parts of the brain.

In Alzheimer’s disease, the region of the brain responsible for memory is under attack. With Parkinson’s disease, the region of the brain responsible for movement is under attack. Otherwise, the prion pathology is similar with Alzheimer’s and CJD. In CTE, the outer regions of the brain are under attack;

As the prion disease pandemic explodes, municipal wastewater treatment systems are becoming weapons of mass destruction. They are collection points and distributors for prions in blood, saliva, mucus, urine, feces, tissue and skin. Since we now dump most of our sewage on crops, ranches, parks, playgrounds, golf courses and gardens, prions are contaminating our food and water supplies more and more every day;

Prion disease is a threat to families, caregivers, healthcare systems and entire communities; and

As the prion disease epidemic explodes among humans, it has contributed to, if not triggered, a similar epidemic in wildlife known as chronic wasting disease (CWD). CWD is further confirmation of the transmissibility of prion disease.

Unfortunately, connecting these dots is not difficult. Prion disease is impossible to stop, which makes pathway management (public exposure) vital. Caregivers, family members and billions of innocent people are caught in the crossfire of this explosive epidemic.

Prion Disease Is Highly Infectious

Prions are a deadly and unstoppable form of protein that migrates, mutates, multiplies and kills with unparalleled efficiency. Prions were first discovered in the late 1980s as a protein-containing biological agent that replicates itself in living cells without nucleic acid. Prions are not alive, which means that they can’t be killed. Neutralizing them is virtually impossible. With each mutation, they become deadlier and more resistant.

Prions cause fatal neurodegenerative disease in humans and other mammals by converting the cellular version of prion protein into a toxic form that erodes the brain and body. Prion disease often is described as a wasting disease that causes a loss of body mass and brain mass.

We know prion disease by other names, which helps cloak the gravity of the overall problem. As this article will explain, humans experience prion disease primarily as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Huntington diseases. These diseases have much in common.

Prion disease is known to impact many mammals. In livestock, it is known as mad cow disease. In deer, elk, moose and reindeer, prion disease is often referred to as chronic wasting disease (CWD). Prion disease has been found in camels, dolphins, elephants, mink, cats and many other species.

Regardless of the species impacted, prion disease causes memory loss, impaired coordination, abnormal movements and overall wasting of the mind and body. Victims become prion incubators and distributors. So do wastewater treatment plants. Governments and industry are working diligently to keep prion disease off the public radar because there is no answer. Ignoring the truth is making the contamination and the tragedy worse.

The Evidence

Until recently, few have considered the possibility that Alzheimer’s disease is a transmissible disease. This denial and misinformation has been fueling a public health crisis around the world for years.

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, an American neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Important reforms to policies to protect public health, however, have been elusive. Prusiner’s most recent study confirms that Alzheimer’s disease is a prion disease–also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSEs). Once again, it demands reform on many levels to protect public health.

“This shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these two rogue proteins together destroy the brain,” said Stanley Prusiner, MD, the study’s senior author and director of the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, part of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “The fact that prion levels also appear linked to patient longevity should change how we think about the way forward for developing treatments for the disease. We need a sea change in Alzheimer’s disease research, and that is what this paper does. This paper might catalyze a major change in AD research.”

Alzheimer’s disease is currently defined based on the presence of toxic protein aggregations in the brain known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles, accompanied by cognitive decline and dementia. New evidence that active Aß and tau prions could be driving the disease – published May 1, 2019 in Science Translational Medicine — could lead researchers to explore new therapies that focus on prions directly. Hopefully, it will lead to many reforms to safeguard public health.

“I learned that scrapie (sheep), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru had all been shown to be transmissible by injecting extracts of diseased brains into the brains of healthy animals,” Prusiner said. Prusiner basically repeated the process with brain samples from those who died of Alzheimer’s disease to complete his latest study.

Prions + Pathways = Victims

Prion disease is highly contagious, incurable and fatal. Despite all of the smoke and mirrors, prion disease is prion disease. It’s killing more and more mammals, including humans, every year. The hype about species barriers is ridiculous, reckless and irresponsible.

A study published in the journal Nature adds to the evidence about the transmissibility of Alzheimer’s disease between people. A second study by the same scientist in early 2016 supports the claim. All logic says that humans also are passing prion disease to livestock and wildlife through our wastewater and sewage dumped on farms, ranches and other open spaces. Likewise, animals are transmitting prion disease back to humans via meat, milk and other pathways.

Unfortunately, the implications are profound. Prion pathways threaten each and every person on the planet. The greatest prion pathway in the world is human sewage. It’s contaminating food and water supplies with deadly prions now. It’s been going on for years, but it’s worse than ever now.

Unfortunately, the CDC quietly took prions off the highly regulated list of select agents because the regulation criminalized entire industries and several reckless practices. It also opened the floodgates to prion mismanagement.

Victims should be quarantined because prions are in the milk, urine, feces, blood, saliva, mucus, skin and cell tissue of all victims–all human byproducts that are washed, dumped, or flushed down sinks and toilets. One can assume that the waste is extra infectious when it comes from funeral homes, nursing homes, hospitals, dental offices, veterinarians, slaughterhouses and some laboratories.

“There is now real evidence of the potential transmissibility of Alzheimer’s,” says Thomas Wiesniewski M.D. a prion and Alzheimer’s researcher at New York University School of Medicine. “In fact, this ability to transmit an abnormal conformation is probably a universal property of amyloid-forming proteins.”

Additional research has determined that the prion pathogen spreads through feces, saliva, blood, mucus, milk, soil, water and the tissue of infected animals and humans. If a single person with prion disease discharges bodily fluids or feces into a public sewer system, that sewage system is permanently infected and the amount of contamination will multiply and intensify daily. Everything discharged from that sewage system—reclaimed water and biosolids—can spread the contamination even further.

land application sewage sludge and biosolids and public health

The urine and sewage connection helps explain why the global epidemic is exploding. More than 50 million people around the world are known to have these neurodegenerative diseases today. Millions more have the disease, but don’t know it, yet. In addition to these people, millions of infected people around the world have used our sewage systems over the past century. Millions more are using them today.

It’s impossible to neutralize or stop prions in even the most sterile environments, including hospitals.

It’s ludicrous to think that treated sewage water or biosolids are prion-free. Especially since prions from people are much more infectious than those found in other species (prions become more aggressive as they work their way up the food chain).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has confirmed that prions are in sewage sludge and wastewater–and that there is no way to detect them or stop them. As such, the EPA has never issued guidance on prion management within sewage processing plants. This lack of directive allows budget-strapped states and counties to regulate the practices in a variety of ways that best suit local municipalities and industries.

Claudio Soto, PhD, professor of neurology at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, and his colleagues confirmed the presence of prions in urine. Prions infect the entire body and all bodily fluids of its victims, including blood, mucus and saliva. Caregivers for anyone with neurodegenerative disease beware.

“Our findings open the possibility that some of the sporadic Alzheimer’s disease cases may arise from an infectious process, which occurs with other neurological diseases such as mad cow disease and its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,” said Soto. “The underlying mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease is very similar to the prion diseases. It involves a normal protein that becomes misshapen and is able to spread by transforming good proteins to bad ones. The bad proteins accumulate in the brain, forming plaque deposits (and inflammation), which kill neurons.”

Misfolded alpha-synuclein and tau protein associated with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively, have been reported in skin tissues of patients with these conditions. Skin could serve as a screen for early diagnosis, but also for monitoring the accumulation of the misfolded proteins in the brain of these neurodegenerative diseases. Unfortunately, skin (and other bodily tissues) is a potential pathway of transmission.

Prions are such a formidable threat that the U.S. government enacted the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, which included a provision to halt research on prions in all but two specialized laboratories.

The U.S. government initially classified prions as select agents that pose an extreme risk to food, water and health systems. Today, governments don’t regulate prions at all.

As such, millions of caregivers are being misinformed, misguided and exposed to an aggressive prion disease. So are friends and family. Unfortunately, Prusiner’s science is being ignored and we all are facing a public health disaster because of the negligence and reckless disregard for public health regarding prions.

“My latest study shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these two rogue proteins together destroy the brain,” said Prusiner.

Prusiner claims that all forms of TSE are caused by infectious prions. Prusiner’s most recent study confirms that Alzheimer’s disease is a prion disease, which means that millions of people with Alzheimer’s disease (and millions who died ahead of them) are highly infectious. Alzheimer’s disease is currently defined based on the presence of toxic protein aggregations in the brain known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles, accompanied by cognitive decline and dementia.

“I learned that scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru had all been shown to be transmissible by injecting extracts of diseased brains into the brains of healthy animals,” Prusiner said.

Prusiner basically repeated the process with brain samples from those who died of Alzheimer’s disease to complete his latest study. Sure enough, healthy animals contracted Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, the implications are profound. Prion pathways threaten each and every person on the planet.

TSE is a spectrum disease that varies in severity and symptoms. The diagnosis depends on which region of the brain is impacted first and by what prion mutation. Few cases of prion disease are identical in terms of symptoms and pathology.

prion disease

According to neuroscientists Dr. Laura Manuelidis, at least 25 percent of Alzheimer’s diagnoses are actually Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which is further up the prion spectrum. CJD, without dispute, is extremely infectious.

When the presenting symptom is memory loss in a human, the diagnoses flow along the following chart.

In humans, the prion spectrum primarily includes Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and CJD–the most aggressive version. Since there are thousands, if not millions of mutations of prions that can impact various regions of the brain, few cases are the same.

The difference between these diseases is very slight and often indistinguishable to neurologists. Due to the similarities, millions of people have CJD, but are diagnosed by their doctors with Alzheimer’s disease. CJD is clearly an aggressive prion disease, but mismanaged on most levels. If we hold to conventional wisdom, where along the spectrum does prion disease become transmissible?

There is no reason to think that anyone on the prion spectrum isn’t a walking time bomb as they expose everyone and everything in their path. It’s impossible to sterilize anything that they touch. Adding to the madness, CJD has not been declared a reportable disease across most nations, so tracking it and containing it from an epidemiological standpoint is impossible. Likewise, Alzheimer’s disease rarely makes it to the death certificate as the primary cause of death. This is the silent pandemic.

treat Alzheimer's disease

There are proven strategies to help avert neurodegenerative disease, including nutrition, exercise and prion aversion. There is not a cure for prion disease, but smart nutrition can ease the symptoms.

Preview and order the eBook now to defend yourself and your family.