Cure for prion diseases?

[Peltigera]

This is a very technical paper but most of the people here should get at least the general thrust of the paper. The researchers may have found a natural (and the potential for a synthetic) method of removing infective prions from the environment. At the moment, there is no method and prions survive in the environment to infect new hosts. This particularly applies to scrapie in sheep and chronic wasting disease in deer. This might now be preventable by simply watering the grazing area with an aqueous mash of these common lichens.

Ascomycota - and lichens in particular - are very interesting things to study, but it is rare for them to become this exciting!

PLoS One. 2011; 6(5): e19836.
Published online 2011 May 11. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019836

PMCID: PMC3092769
Copyright This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Degradation of the Disease-Associated Prion Protein by a Serine Protease from Lichens

www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019836

[MacBeth]

I gave it a shot, but apparently all these decades later my Sciencephobia is still active.
If someone can recap it without the technical language in any greater detail - but I understand if that is a lot of trouble to go to

[Peltigera]

basically, you can macerate certain lichens in water and spray the resultant slurry on scrapie infected ground and the lichen particles will destroy the infective prions.

[MacBeth]

Thank you. What a wonderful step forward if it proves effective.