Slightly more clickbaity title than the BBC's "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases"[0] which also says "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious - you cannot catch it from contact with people who have it... The researchers say all of the people in their study had been treated as a child with cadaver-derived human growth hormone, or c-hGH, that was contaminated with brain proteins that are seen in Alzheimer's disease... used to treat at least 1,848 people in the UK between 1959 and 1985".
I didn't find it clickbaity at all. The contents of the article were exactly what I expected based on the headline, and I didn't know this was possible.
The really interesting thing here is that Alzheimer's seems to be transmissible from person to person via biological material. The BBC headline you quoted, "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases", totally buries the lede and is borderline misleading.
My reading is that m-i-l is using "clickbaity" to mean "doesn't prevent all possible wrong conclusions one could draw from the headline". (In this case, the wrong conclusion would be thinking that because there exists cases of alzheimer being transmitted through some mechanism that Alzheimer was contagious.)
While it's certainly understandable that we are all tired of clickbait that purposefully misleads the reader, imo we should not overcorrect by demanding that headlines cannot be misinterpreted by arbitrarily ignorant readers.
That's right. Living in the UK and taking an interest in popular science during the "mad cow disease crisis"[0], I had been aware that prion diseases can be transmitted in humans if (for example) you eat (infected) brains of your dead ancestors[1], but the headline as originally submitted ("Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's cases") did suggest to me that we might be at the start of something altogether new and much more alarming.
> "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious"
It may not be infectious like a cold or herpes, but it was amazing to me that it is transmissible. I spent some time Googling and it looks like the appropriate term is "Donor-Derived Infections."
I think that, in principle, any disease that a donor has has some small chance of affecting the recipient. Infections, cancers, prion diseases, toxins are well known to do so, some immune issues also have a clear pathway, but in principle even genetic issues could affect the recipient depending on a whole host of complicated biology that we don't fully understand.
I wonder if we will ever find methods of flushing the brain out or doing anything within the human brain that will allow us to defend against things like this.
I know our brains are very protected in our bodies and for good reason but I still wonder how far we will be able to go if we can ever safely and humanely bypass that.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68126907