The first sentence just got truncated 'cos I ducked out for a smoke halfway through the post (sorry ' />) but that's what I meant by "your body could naturally give you an untreatable, inevitably fatal prion disease even if you never encountered an infected animal--that you DO encounter them just makes it orders of magnitude more likely". As to whether ignorance is bliss, you're probably right since it doesn't seem like there's a darned thing we can do about the buggers except worry, pray and be very grateful they aren't a lot more common than they are. I assume if you stuck them in a nuclear reactor or something the chemical bonds holding them together would break, but I'm reluctant for other reasons to do that with, say, my freaking arm. Seems like that's what sucks about a lot of the really small and basic pathogens: There are PLENTY of things that can destroy them, but in a lot of cases anything that will take them out will take out an infected person a lot sooner.

On the upside, I also read a story at Cracked about a morbidly obese woman who went into have ovarian cysts removed and was back shortly after release because she got necrotizing faciitis at the hospital. How is that the upside? Apparently she survived because she was SO fat the bacteria wasn't able to eat its way to any major organs and, according to their quotation of her doctor, ultimately just "gave up" because its eyes were bigger than her stomach.