Ramon
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Composting from sewage sludge

I run several sewage plants and find the sludge emerging from the plants to be a great compost.

rot
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I don't know what your sludge is but here's a link to a water treatment facility in the Malibu area along the same line of thinking.

https://www.lvmwd.com/index.aspx?page=173

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I would be very concerned with heavy metals as well as pharmaceutical residues.

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The heavy metals thing was something that was talked about a lot early on with sludge fertilizers (the industry does NOT like the term sludge and prefers it to be called "biosolids". A rose by any other name would smell as sweet... :roll: ). Turns out it isn't a big issue.

Pesticide, chemical and pharma residues however are another thing entirely. These continue to be studied and problematic. Even more so is the issues of prions, or protonaceous infectants, small bits of left over protein residue that are being linked to [url=https://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/41188/title/Prions_complicit_in_Alzheimer%E2%80%99s_disease]Alzheimers,[/url], [url=https://www.mad-cow.org/00/dec00_31_news.html]mad cow[/url], and other like diseases (Chronic Wasting Disease in deer has now been implicated as a prionic disease); seem the concentrations in sludge can be 600 or more times that found in Nature, and [url=https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es703186e]survive the anaerobic digestion process very nicely[/url]. And [url=https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es0516965]these DO stay in soils[/url]for longer than we thought (a darn good reason not to feed animals to animals). Using the [url=https://www.sehn.org/precaution.html]Precautionary Principle[/url], (the rule in both Europe and now Canada), we should preclude our usage of these products until we better understand what it is we are doing (and nukes, and chemicals, and GMO, and... :roll: ). But all this said, it does raise the spectre of backlash against ALL composting regimens if we embrace bad ones like this. Aerobic digestion (IMO the only thing that should be called compost) is a safe and stable product with negligible protein residue. I think anaerobic digestion should be a very specialized and monitored tool, like nukes, with a monitored distribution, not widespread retail. Bokashi (plant based, low protein) good, chemical and prion laden toilette leavings, maybe not. IMHO...

[url=https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14594&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30&sid=e861e5a14d6f6310bdb4bb6749b472a6]We have discussed a lot of this before...[/url], but I'm always happy to issue warning when warning is due...

HG
Last edited by The Helpful Gardener on Wed Jan 13, 2010 9:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

rot
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Reviewing what we discussed previously via the link HG provided, reminded me of a New York Times series of articles that covers just about everything discussed here and in previous thread.

For anyone interested in the subjects discussed, you should still be able to read these articles without registering with the Times.

https://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters?ref=us

to sense
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Fantastic link, rot; really great stuff...

This is one of the main reasons we do what we do here; organics is a realistic and attainable alternative to tainting our water with chemicals or farm wastes. Composting can adress nearly every issue in that series in one fashion or another, and even the illegal dumping sites in NJ might be adressed best by [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoremediation]phytoremediation[/url] or [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoremediation]mycoremediation[/url], by gardening of an advanced sort, really.

I have to paraphrase Dick Clark and say it is gardening that will save the world, quite literally, and organic gardening to be specific. Good things can happen when you garden like you are part of the planet instead of just riding for free...

HG

rot
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Mycoremediation by accident but mycoremediation none the less because of some of the junk I throw in this bin.

From bin started January this year.
[img]https://i867.photobucket.com/albums/ab237/Agent86photo/Compost%20Musrooms%20Dec%2009/shroom091219_1.jpg[/img]

Close up of one of about ten clumps
[img]https://i867.photobucket.com/albums/ab237/Agent86photo/Compost%20Musrooms%20Dec%2009/shroom091219_2.jpg[/img]

One more close up of another clump
[img]https://i867.photobucket.com/albums/ab237/Agent86photo/Compost%20Musrooms%20Dec%2009/shroom091219_3.jpg[/img]

I started this bin from some wood chips in a barrel that had been left in the rain. After a couple of months I drained the water and then a couple of months later I added about 5 inches of chips to start the bin with an approximate foot print of 3' x 3'. Afterwards I added from the barrel as I added other stuff.

Now that the mushrooms have kicked in full swing it eats about a foot and half in about a month. I keep feeding it and it keeps eating.

Lots of worms too. I was emptying rain water the other month and displaced a couple from the top surface.

This bin is on pavers so it will be interesting to see how much it finally reduces when I stop feeding it. I had another that went fungal on the bare ground and it kind of just went to nothing. Hard to tell. That's when the squirrels started interfering and kicked up their excavations into the bin. Not a major disaster. That spot is a back fill area with a lot of junk rubble in the ground. The trees next to it will be happy for a long while.

The pictures above are after I added 3 liters of ancient diet pepsi the previous month.
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hshields
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The US EPA and waste industry are promoting the landspreading of Class B sewage sludge containing infectious human and animal prions on grazing lands, hay fields, and dairy pastures. This puts livestock and wildlife at risk of infection. They ingest large quantities of dirt and top dressed sludge with their fodder.

Prion infected Class A sludge "biosolids" compost is spread in parks, playgrounds, home lawns, flower and vegetable gardens - putting humans, family pets, and children with their undeveloped immune systems and hand-to-mouth "eat dirt" behavior at risk. University of Wisconsin prion researchers, working with $100,000 EPA grant and a $5 million Dept. of Defense grant, have found that prions become 680 times more infectious in certain types of soil. Prions can survive for over 3 years in soils. And human prions are 100,000 times more difficult to inactivate than animal prions

Recently, researchers at UC Santa Cruz, and elsewhere, announced that Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a prion disease. "Prion" = proteinaceous infectious particle which causes always fatal TSEs (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) in humans and animals including BSE (Mad Cow Disease), scrapie in sheep and goats, and Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, elk and moose. Human prion diseases are AD and CJD (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease,) and other rarer maladies. Infectious prions have been found in human and animal muscle tissue including heart, saliva, blood, urine, feces and many other organs.

Alzheimer's rates are soaring as Babyboomers age - there are now over 5.3 million AD victims in US shedding infectious prions in their blood, urine and feces, into public sewers. This Alzheimer's epidemic has almost 500,000 new victims each year. No sewage treatment process inactivates prions - they are practically indestructible. The wastewater treatment process reconcentrates the infectious prions in the sewage sludge.

Quotes from Dr. Joel Pedersen, Univ. of Wisconsin, on his prion research:

"
Our results suggest that if prions were to enter municipal waste water treatment systems, most of the agent would partition to activated sludge solids, survive mesophilic anaerobic digestion, and be present in
treated biosolids. Land application of biosolids containing prions could represent a route for their unintentional introduction into the environment. Our results argue for excluding inputs of prions to municipal wastewater treatment."



"Prions could end up in wastewater treatment plants via slaughterhouse drains, hunted game cleaned in a sink, or humans with vCJD shedding prions in their urine or faeces, Pedersen says"
(Note - This UW research was conducted BEFORE UCSC scientists determined that Alzheimer's Disease is another prion disease which may be shedding infectious prions into public sewers and Class B and Class A sludge "biosolids.)



Helane Shields, Alton, NH 03809


www.sludgevictims.com/pathgens/prions-composting.html

www.sludgevictims.com/pathogens/prion.html

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Helane, thank you for your obviously informed and insighful post. I too believe this to be a pressing issue lacking in recognition despite growing evidence of its perils and poor judgement.

However it is worthy of note that any waste stream from a meat eating or omniverous animal (including us) contains [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion]proteinaceous infectants[/url] or prions, so excluding them all sort of defeats the purpose of a water treatment facility. We do need to recognize these waste streams as probable toxins and not people friendly compost, and find more acceptable methods of disposal; possibly dumping and capping as we do with old landfills, etc.) And these topics need more research to find the bullets from the smoking gun.

But we do have a smoking gun...

HG

rot
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Since bears and other omnivores have been squatting in woods and watersheds for a long long time it would seem that prions have been around a long long time now.

That means we can narrow the problem down to where such things might be concentrated like sewer sludge. Maybe the problem isn't so much prions but sewer sludge or rather the sewers that produce such sludge.

It has been mentioned that prions survive is some soils for up to three years in some soils so just what does break down these seemingly indestructible bugaboos? UV light? Fungi? Bacteria? We know it's not the various chlorines that go into waste water treatment plants.

Is there a better way than 19th century sewer technology to deal with these things? Please. I'd like to hear.

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Rot, as with pesticides, martinis, and little kids, the toxicityty is all about density. Much as a food chain concentrates toxins in apical predators, a poop loop concentrates toxins wherever it tends to bottleneck. So in this case, collecting it all in one place is the real issue; pocket units taking care of neighborhoods instead of the whole city (allowing animal wastes to be treated on site, etc.) would be a step in the right direction.

A guy I know has the first in Connecticut onsite marsh system where he hold and digests in a tank, pumping small amounts of waste into his marsh system at a regular interval. Humanure composting is not a food crop solution, but it wouldt help with diffusing prionic concentration.

But like Helane's post says the mooney end of this is trying to get MORE use of this stuff, not less. THERE is the immediate problem. On a golf course I might say ok to Class A as most are set up to reclaim their water and spray it back out (UV seems to be the best way to degrade this stuff). But it needs more testing and we are seeing new diseases and syndromes spring up around this stuff. Good sense says slow down...

Both Canada and Europe have adopted the Precautionary Principle around pesticides and are expanding this thinking to include far more lines of product. Until We the People get good and fed up of being guinea pigs to corporate chemical experiments, and put the onus of proof on companies to make safe products, gross indecencies in public health risk for profit will continue unabated in this country. This is simply one more example.

HG

rot
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OK. So we can rule out 19th century sewer technology as a solution for the most part because the concentrating effect is a whole lot a density. Then what?

Me and the people are quite used to flush and forget. That's how the equation gets complicated with just not the expected human pathogens but antibiotics, detergents with their fresh pine scents, drain cleaners, anti-depressants and all the other stuff that gets flushed down the toilet that would defy my imagination just muddles everything about this waste stream.

If everyone had to dispose of everything they fail to consume on their own little parcel (I would not be so cruel to inflict apartment dwellers) then I think we would all be little more considerate of first what we bought and then how we dealt with the unused portion.

The fact of the matter is that we buy the products and because our disposal costs are subsidized through sewer systems and trash pick up, we just don't have to deal with the true costs of our purchases. You can bash corporations all you like but in the end they only feed us what we buy.

If we stopped buying junk then most suppliers would stop producing it.

Excuse me while I shed some prions in the back yard.

to sense

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Points taken rot, and good ones at that...

But if the kids keep screaming for candy, do you chuck the veggies and hand out the chocolate bars?

I don't want government watching my diet, let alone the corporate world, but what is the mechanism to trigger responsible action? When the GHG emissions from your SUV helps trigger drought and sea surface temperature increases for equatorial regions, when should you say "Not my problem."? That's an African issue? A Maldives issue?

When the prionic concentration of sewer sludge, maybe from your city, maybe some of my prions, makes my aunt forget who I am, makes my uncle's days a challenge in his golden years instead of the wondeful time together they had dreamed of for decades, is that their issue? Mine? All of ours?

What if there is a corporate entity making a buck off all these transactions? What if there were warning bells all along, people kept telling them, and they decided to keep getting paid? Now who's responsible?

I'd ask my aunt, but I wouldn't expect a clear answer. She was a sharp women, a retired nurse manager, with an ascerbic wit and discerning mind. Still has a sharp tongue, too, but gets me and my brothers mixed up now, has trouble in conversation following a thread. She is still a wonderul women and I love her, but this disease is stealing her from us, from herself, a little more every day. A slow insiduous creeping theft, the slowest mugging ever for the most valuable prize of all, cognizance. It is an evil happening far more often today and we have the first inklings of why... so shouldn't SOMETHING be done?

HG

rot
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I have no kids. I know enough to not tell parents how raise their kids. I know that when the kids scream for candy I will not be the one to deny them. I'm certainly weak in that category to boot.

Same too for adults. I know that if you suddenly took away the sewer system and regular trash pick up that you would see night soil spilled on front lawns and trash piled in the street.

As I watch my father-in-law forget those pieces of life that make up my wife’s I am painfully aware of the effects of this wasting away whether prion driven or not.

Thanks to multiple agrarian revolutions there are perhaps more people than there should and thanks to multiple scientific revolutions we are living longer than we should.

Koyanasquatsi?

I am not so clever to pronounce that life is out of balance. I will question however.

I am only stopped from squatting in a bucket at this point because polite society, including my wife, would not tolerate it and we are not disposed (pun intended) at this point. The mores and the laws are against it. Give it time and we will all be squatting in a bucket to conserve water.

What if a corporate entity is making a buck? Since when is there someone not making something off of someone else? Since when is this a corporate thing? The first rule of show business: give the people what they want.

We got this way because we wanted it. We wanted cheap energy and got lots of gas and nuclear energy. We wanted hygiene and got plastic wrap and paper towels and and sewers. We wanted big plants and got fertilizers. Give the people what they want.

My father’s aunt that just died at a hundred and one and might wonder what we're fretting over. After all the deaths from disease and famine that we experienced over the centuries, we should be happy. We should be content.

To sense and a curse

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Rot, as with pesticides, martinis, and little kids, the toxicityty is all about density. Much as a food chain concentrates toxins in apical predators, a poop loop concentrates toxins wherever it tends to bottleneck. So in this case, collecting it all in one place is the real issue; pocket units taking care of neighborhoods instead of the whole city (allowing animal wastes to be treated on site, etc.) would be a step in the right direction.
HG, I only point this out because I heard another smart guy on the radio - an endocrinologist. I'm sure you already know everything I'm about to say. The view you give here is toxicology. Toxicology is important, but not a complete assessment of a potential threat. Endocrinology shows that sometimes, the opposite is true - a higher dose of a given substance can be less harmful than the lower dose. Further, unrelated substances join together in the waste stream, and can have varying effect based on combinations and proportions. In other words, we don't know eDiTeD.

HG, the other big point is language here IMO. I like to call acid fermentation "pickling" or "preservation", as that gives a better understanding. But I also say "bokashi compost" to indicate where it fits in my life and the diversity of materials. This allows me to communicate more efficiently, albeit at your expense. We have competing definitions, but mine is broader than yours, which in English, gives my definition the advantage.

IMHO, the composting council ought to get out ahead and take control of the word "compost" (the political route), which they are trying and failing to do, or alternatively, modify the word or come up with a new one so that it is not so easily confused (the marketplace of ideas based route). Maybe when our language bubbles were small enough that we could organize and control a word, doing so made sense. But now, with people coming into the mix with an instinctual sense of english etymology (they speak related or parent tongues), combined with non native speakers who have no instinctual sense and thus crave a more strictly logical approach (boring!), control is being eroded out of necessity. English is a sort of modern day Latin, and now belongs to a great many more number of people than it has since its inception. That means we both have a huge advantage in the world, but also lose a degree of control over our own identity.

Perhaps the solution is to play the game. Slice up the word or tack something on, and do it consistently enough. In other words, leading by example and with carrots. Then you have a word you can use that retains specificity in a natural, self-sustaining manner, just as it is now regaining generality. Hegemony over words, especially in English, is next to impossible. It's a language in which common usage and the needs of the moment drive meaning, rather than meaning as defined by an elite driving usage (as in French).

probably a prefix is the best way to go. two word solutions are too easily chopped up.

rot
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Toil, maybe the word you are reaching for is bioremediation where composting is but one mode.

to sense
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well, not really. you mean as far as life function or personal ritual? I just mean that when people recycle kitchen waste, do something to it involving microbes, then use it to feed soil, it still feels like composting (as in my bokashi and worm bins). Sort of the way the first cars were called horseless carriage. So the word is now used to express a lifestyle choice, not just a technology.

I don't mean to say that bioremediation should be called composting. or that anaerobic digestion of human waste is composting. But what else do I call my daily ritual of saving food, adding it to a bin with other foods, and seeing it through until it is worm castings? How can I be in the club without borrowing the word?

Although right now, in a very cold half basement/half first floor with a loose door, I have a bunch of bokashi in worm bins, and it's cooking enough to keep the worms nice and toasty. But in the summer I keep the heat down.

rot
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I don't know about personal rituals. I have no idea what you mean by life function. Lifestyle issues haven't occurred to me so much as a change in thinking has. I think more and more in terms of must I trash this thing or that thing or can I get something out of it instead. I certainly haven't changed my lifestyle and don't recommend it. If folks must change their lifestyles much, I don't think any of this bioremediation stuff is going to stick.

I seem to be adapting as circumstances change. Maybe one of these days I'll be fermenting stuff in the garage instead of filling up bins and adding water. Maybe in addition to filling up bins.

Personally I don't want to be limited by the word composting or compost. I think of myself diverting stuff from the waste stream and remediating that material into something useful. Further, I remediate the soil by adding organic matter whether through the composting process or by mulching with whatever I have that is mulchable.

No big deal. Just my funny sense of diction.

to sense

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Toil
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good points rot.


just let it sit though. etymology + process similarity + similar function in life = a "stolen" word.

can I interest you in some acid fermentation?

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Perhaps lactic acid digestion?

Your stomach is already doing it... :wink:

HG

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lol I should've stuck to endocrinology...

:wink:

rot
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I think I need some to time to digest it all. Maybe turn it over in my mind a few times. Spread it around a bit and see what grows. Air it out some. I need to be careful, I can get a bit dry for some. I'm sure if I keep reducing something will come of it all.

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I don't know about dry rot ( :lol: )

You do however occasionally stretch an analogy to the point of breaking...

:lol:

HG

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I would think that e.coli would be quite a problem as well. In China, one does not eat raw vegetables for this reason.

Toil
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I think that was california spinach you were thinking of, not chinese veggies...

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E.coli is an issue of dead depleted soils that have no other biologies than the hard core facultative anaerobes. E. coli is one of those.

In healthy organic soils with a plethora of biodiversity, bacteria, and bacterial predators that eat and compete with these organisms, they never rise to levels of toxicity. We each walk around with a gutfull of that particular organism, so why are we not all constantly sick? Because it never achieves dominance of that ecosystem... us.

Don't blame the bug, blame the ones that made it bad... us.

HG

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word HG.

I wonder how much other facultative anaerobes compete with this helpful but misunderstood microbe?

it is important to remember that we eat this stuff all the time. but we don't eat massive doses of it, like HG points out.

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The most common bacteria on that list is Lactobacillus. The other white facultative anaerobe. :lol:

Any other species that occupies your particular niche is competition. Perhaps the presence of Lactobacillus in our gut is what keeps E. coli in check? Perhaps it's dominant presence in Nature does the same?

We have fallen into a trust of the man made over nature. Factory farmed food gets a clean bill of health for the plastic wrap, but an aquaintances mom just asked her if the eggs her own daughter had given her from her own chickens would keep long enough to color as Easter eggs. When she asked her Mom why she wasn't eating them already, Mom said, "The yolks are too yellow."

As Leah said...

:roll:

HG

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I know a little about how the city sewer system works. The city has monitors down in the sewer pipes all over town. If a monitor picks up something that is not suppose to be there it sets off an alarm. With monitors all over the city they can trace the toxic material back to the source very quick and easy. You can get a copy of all the materials that go threw the sewer plant for free you just have to ask for it. Once a year it is posted in the news paper. I'm not worried about putting sewage on my garden.

But I have read human waste has bacteria that invade the brain. Over a period of 20+ years it makes people go crazy.

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hshields wrote:.

Alzheimer's rates are soaring as Babyboomers age - there are now over 5.3 million AD victims in US shedding infectious prions in their blood, urine and feces, into public sewers. This Alzheimer's epidemic has almost 500,000 new victims each year. No sewage treatment process inactivates prions - they are practically indestructible. The wastewater treatment process reconcentrates the infectious prions in the sewage sludge.
In nature only the strong survive, the weak die out. Man kind has invented medician to keep the weak alive. The weak breed with the strong and the human race becomes weaker and weaker. Soon everyones DNA is contaminated and we starts seeing lots of sickness and wonder why.

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It is not a bacteria, but a protein, sometimes secreted by bacteria, but found in the excreta of any creature consuming animal proteins. It becomes concentrated at up to 600 times normal background levels in sewer sludge. And as noted, it is not broken down by normal composting, even at commercial treatment levels.

There is little evidence yet on this front; the science is new, and so are the experiments. It may be years before we start to see good solid data.

But there is VERY compelling evidence that there are serious issues here, so why should we continue to use the general populace as guinea pigs? Europe and Canada have put the Precautionary Principle into law to protect their populations; we continue to labor under laws designed to help out corporations. If this stuff is so harmless, prove it.

Instead we, the unfunded and unprotected populace are forced to prove it harmful while unknown numbers of us are subjected to the terrifying prospect of losing the very core of our being, our memories. Our families are subjected to watching a wasting more insidious than any physical degeneration. There are several specific prioinic poisoning incidents that point clearly to the possibility of prionic brain plaques being a causal agent for Alzheimers, yet the damage continues until you can "prove it in a court of law."

Is this any way to run a country? Tobacco, DDT, BisA; why must we continually subject ourselves to a toxic stew at the whim of corporate powers more concerned with bottom line than customer health? Why shouldn't they have to prove their product safe instead of the other way around? :? :x

HG

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because we don't make them.

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Can't argue with that...

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The Helpful Gardener wrote:It is not a bacteria, but a protein, sometimes secreted by bacteria, but found in the excreta of any creature consuming animal proteins.

HG
Another good reason for becoming vegetarian! :)

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True RBG; it has crossed my mind at several points that this is a meat eaters disease visited on everyone...

HG

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so glad you posted this on vegetarian night. We had that yam cake and some gluten tonight in a stir fry.

so does anything break down prions?

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Not as far as I can see so far. It stands to reason that as a protein it HAS to break down somewhere, but if anaerobic digestion followed by thermophilic aerobic composting isn't doing it, what are we waiting for? A volcano?

HIGH heat does it, but nothing we would hit naturally in the ecosystem. I'm bettting on some fungal process (we still haven't gotten all that figured out) or a specific bacteria we haven't identified yet. Maybe actinobacters. Otherwise nature would just bioaccumulate this stuff until it was completely toxic.

It's like water; a matter of concentrations. A sprinkle here and there is fine; enough of it it one place can drown you...

I will do some more research, but the info is still spotty; like I said, this is new stuff...

HG

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hope I'm not contributing to hysteria

excerpted from https://www.news.wisc.edu/13918
Pedersen notes that soils are a complex mixture of organic and inorganic components that vary across the landscape and that scientists are just beginning to tease out factors in soils that may contribute to transmissibility. The new study implies, he says, "that some soils may promote the transmission of the prion agent more readily than others."

Why that's the case is unknown, Pedersen explains, but the Wisconsin team is exploring several hypotheses: that the soil particles might somehow protect the prion from degradation in the digestive system, that prions bound to clay might change the route or degree of uptake of the agent, or that the mineral somehow alters the size of prion aggregates, which have been shown to be more infectious than prions alone.

The Helpful Gardener
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Aha, "prionic aggregates are more infectious than prions alone".

So concentrating them with soil particles MIGHT be a bad idea?

It seems very possible to me that this might be the biological control on many species; you build up too much of your feces in an area and it limits your population, whether we are talking about CWD in deer or Alzheimer's in humans. But it does seem like we shouldn't make it worse by spreading prions around willy nilly.

And WHAT does these things in? It HAS to be something natural... seems our bodies systems take care of much of this usually in the ubiquitinproteasome system (UPS), that disposes of damaged or mutated cells, but...
Mutations in different UPS components have been found to be associated with disorders linked to amyloid-like protein aggregation, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases.


So somehow either the specific prions, or another causal agent is ruining our ability to deal with these...

Aha, seems [url=https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es060943h]soil organisms DO deal with this issue[/url], but below the infected area and not so much above it. So surface applications with high prionic content seem a bad idea...

[url=https://www.vetres.org/index.php?option=article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/vetres/pdf/2006/05/v6041.pdf]This study[/url] shows that BSE doesn't survive cow's stomachs, but this obviously doesn't apply to the deer in CWD. More stomachs? Different biology in those stomachs?

[url=https://www.thaiscience.info/Article%20for%20ThaiScience/Article/2/Ts-2%20enzymatic%20degradation%20of%20prion-like%20protein,%20sup35nm-his6.pdf]These guys[/url]have figured out a safe testing method using a created prion, because they think there are enzyme actions that might work, but we are still early in the testing of these prions, so who knows?

More questions than answers, for sure...

HG

rot
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..

The first two studies suggest an anaerobic digestive process is the path forward.

So for prions then, a septic tank with a leech field?

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