Research into how to do vegan (and probably vegetarian) diets safely and sustainably will come in extremely handy if/when some prion disease finds a way to cause worse issues than they already do.
The relative irrelevance of prion diseases to most people right now seems to echo the relative irrelevance of coronaviruses pre-covid. On the one hand they’re sufficiently rare to be dismissed; on the other hand they were sufficiently mild and familiar to be dismissed; neither state of the world offers any guarantee it won’t change.
If/when the thing that goes wrong with animal proteins and is transmitted by eating them becomes a worse problem, I expect that we’ll see an extreme influx of interest in how to do plant-based diets safely, healthily, and cheaply. Research like the community is currently doing on the impact of vegan diets in EA folks will come in very handy in those possible futures.
Research into how to do vegan (and probably vegetarian) diets safely and sustainably will come in extremely handy if/when some prion disease finds a way to cause worse issues than they already do.
The relative irrelevance of prion diseases to most people right now seems to echo the relative irrelevance of coronaviruses pre-covid. On the one hand they’re sufficiently rare to be dismissed; on the other hand they were sufficiently mild and familiar to be dismissed; neither state of the world offers any guarantee it won’t change.
If/when the thing that goes wrong with animal proteins and is transmitted by eating them becomes a worse problem, I expect that we’ll see an extreme influx of interest in how to do plant-based diets safely, healthily, and cheaply. Research like the community is currently doing on the impact of vegan diets in EA folks will come in very handy in those possible futures.