Talk:Prions and Encephalopathies

I picked your page to read because I’ve always been intrigued by prions and wanted to know more. Your page was certainly informative, packed with useful information, and very interesting. You clearly did a great job of mastering and understanding a very complicated topic.

A few suggestions if you would like—a lot of the prion diseases you listed seemed somewhat similar to me and I had trouble remembering which was which. Maybe highlighting a unique fact about each of them would be helpful. Also, your section “Exotic Ungulate Spongiform Encephalopathy, Feline Spongiform Encephalopathy, and Non-human Primate TSE” was a little hard to follow. I’m sure you understand everything a lot better than those of us who haven’t done background research, so maybe read it over trying to think of it from the perspective of someone who knows a lot less about prions. Finally, I think people would be interested in hearing about human prion diseases, such as Kuru in Papa New Guinea, believed to be transmitted through cannibalism, and ultimately leading Australia to pass a law banning cannibalism. Maybe I’m misinformed, but I also thought I read that Mad Cow could be passed through cannibalism as well?

Also, just a head’s up to give it another read-through. I think I found a couple errors such as “the misfolded protein causes a loss of fear in humans”. Anyway, your page was great and all my comments are really just that I want to know more!

This page was extremely well written! The information was comprehensive yet concise making it easy for the reader to follow. I liked how 4 distinct diseases caused by different prions and encephalopathies were outlined and described. I felt like this gave the reader a better overview and understanding of how prions work- moreover their responsibility for some well known infectious diseases in both animals and humans. It would be interesting to learn a little bit more about the feline and primate encephalopathies. This section I think could add a great deal more if it was expounded upon just a bit. Other than that just a final read-through and edit, but this is a great topic!