The living dead. Slow moving, groaning, disgusting looking and just plain scary people with a desire for human brains. Popular in shows like “The Walking Dead” and the new Netflix original “Santa Clara Diet,” there are many variations on this in popular culture. Could zombies really be a thing though?
In many science fiction novels and movies, a strange viral outbreak causes the dead to rise or people to go mad. In real life there is a scary infection that has astoundingly similar symptoms and associations to a zombie outbreak. Prions are a type of infectious protein that cause disease in humans, cows, deer, mice and sheep. Generally speaking, the diseases are called spongiform encephalopathies, but each has its own name depending on the animal it affects. The most common is mad cow disease. From 1986 to 2001 the United Kingdom (U.K.) was plagued by an outbreak of mad cow disease that devastated farming communities.
The prions that cause mad cow disease can be transferred to humans if neural tissue from the cow is consumed. Prions are not a normally occurring protein in the body. Proteins have special shapes that they are folded into and if not folded properly they won’t function. However prions are misfolded and continue to function but in a new and dangerous way. There is no cure for a prion infection. They are resistant to almost any form of sterilization and must be burned or undergo intense chemical treatment, such as formalin. In the U.K. outbreak, the infected cows were killed and burned to prevent the spread of the prions.
Humans can become infected through inheriting a gene for the misfolded protein, consuming neural tissue from an infected animal (think brain), and from cannibalistic activity (continue thinking brain). When the human version of mad cow disease was discovered – called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) or Kuru – it was in a cannibalistic tribe of people who exhibited strange symptoms.
Symptoms of prion infection may not reveal themselves for many years, even decades. A person will begin to lose control of their motor skills and may jerk, walk strangely, have random outbursts of laughter and stop sleeping. They may also form grotesque lesions on the skin. The disease is fatal. The Center for Food Safety reports that at least 143 people died from consuming infected meat during the U.K. outbreak.Professor of biology Dr. David Reid said of prions, “It is a really scary concept to think of an infectious protein. How do you fight it? You can’t. You have to prevent transmission. Period. That’s the only thing we can do.” Reid 100 percent recommends that you do not eat brain, ever.