Culture and Respect

[Autumnlicious]

In any case, if they're airborne, not eating people won't do much to stop it. If not for you, I would now be in the 'don't eat people, prions!' camp thanks to the point that Moros made.

Calm down.

Prions are merely Proteins.

To make such airborne, you'd need some mechanism to crystallize or hold them in suspension in a vapor.

After that, you'd need them in such a large quantity that UV breakdown is reduced and a way to ingest them.

One prion stands a fast chance of degrading even when inside the perfect environment (neural tissue).

Now imagine how hard it is to get an infectious quantity into a volatile, stable, pathogenic state, then to bypass your nose and lungs, then to somehow get into your blood stream DESPITE it being a giant honking protein that normally is rejected from a lipid bilayer membrane, and finally end up inside the appropriate environment.

Can you even think of a creature that uses an airborne proteinaceous venom?

Every single creature that uses the proteinaceous venom ends up finding someway to inject it directly into the hosts tissues, like snakes, cone snails or Tarsiers.

Viral pathogens stand a much greater chance due to the multiple coats and structures that make them resilient to environments outside their normal host. Many possess specific receptors that allow them to be pulled into their cellular victims.

That is no way comparable to a naked protein.

Don't lick the crystallized prions if you can help it.