That’s really interesting, thanks for contributing!

So, my question, intellectuals, is this: why did I—someone with more medical knowledge than the average non-healthcare professional—learn about pathogenic proteins yesterday? Why are they more widely spoken about? They’re absolutely fascinating if nothing else.

Now, it’s important to say that everything I’ve read is clear that TSEs are exceedingly rare in humans… but not unheard of.

Here’s the really scary bit… from my reading, I found that prion infection can lead to a disease in the category of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). These cause widespread neurological damage and are always fatal.

As I understand it, prions—being misfolded proteins with normal primary structures—have the ability to somehow convert correctly folded proteins into a corrupted form on contact, which can cause a chain reaction leading to such conversions systemically and en masse.

I rather like the effect, though. And for the avoidance of any doubt, this is “as scanned” and hasn’t been edited in any way.

Incidentally, unspaced em dashes—rather like spaced hyphens—can be used to offset parentheticals rather than relying on parentheses too heavily.

Do you see what I did there?

Anyway, I’m going to keep using em dashes in my writing because I like them and they’re very useful.

Reclaim the em dash!

If only they understood the irony of their censorship.