Martiijn Huynen wrote (paraphrasing) that as far as he knew prions did
not adapt
I'm not sure that IS true. The situation with the current BSE agent in
the UK is still not clear but if the people who have died of
Creutzfeld-Jacob did get it from infected beef then they are a lot
younger than other cases to date. My proviso here is that there may have
been cases in the pat not identified as CJD.
Be that as it may, there is some hints that the agent in question, which
appears to have come from sheep, has adapted its host range and its
ability to catalyse change in normal PrP. sounds fairly alive to me..
I accept that some of this is hypothesis, the prooblem with 'slow
virus' diseases is modelling behaviour.
Mike O'Hara
