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RE: Richard Dawkins Says Lab Grown Human Meat Could "Eradicate The Taboo Against Cannibalism"
Interesting read. I think when mentioning Kuru it is worthy to note that the tribes buried the bodies for days, allowing extreme decay before exhuming their bodies and ingesting their flesh and maggots. In contrast, we refrigerate meat if it isn't being consumed right away to preserve it.
This is from the Wikipedia article on Kuru: "Corpses of family members were often buried for days then exhumed once the corpses were infested with maggots at which point the corpse would be dismembered and served with the maggots as a side dish."
I'm a vegetarian and have no interest in human meat, but I am guessing their particular method of eating buried rotten flesh could be a large factor in health issues.
There are some things that I'd really prefer not to know.
This is one of them.
I... I guess I can be grateful this was not a cultural practice I grew up with.
It's somewhat interesting to consider Dawkins ghoulish interest in cannibalism in this context. Sadly, he won't be able to get any rotting, maggot-infested human brains grown in labs.
Actually, no I'm not sad about that.
For Dawkins sake, I hope he's not either.
Haha yes, the burial/exhumation process adds an additional element of horror to the idea.
Good points!
the problem is that there is no good way to sterilize something infected with prions, medical instruments used on patients of those diseases have to be discarded because they can't be reliably sterilized.
Sure, I wasn't challenging how infectious it may be. My response was regarding the suggestion that eating humans can lead to Kuru. I'm not a medical expert and it looks like the initial formation/cause of prions is still at the hypothetical level of understanding. I tried to find how many other instances there are of eating meat with that level of decay in other cultures and came up empty-handed, though I did see information about one nutritionist who claims to have cured cancer by doing so.
I see this from the Wikipedia article about prions: "Current research suggests that the primary method of infection in animals is through ingestion. It is thought that prions may be deposited in the environment through the remains of dead animals and via urine, saliva, and other body fluids. They may then linger in the soil by binding to clay and other minerals.[63]"
So my next question as to cause vs. transmission is: Do we have much research on the effects of eating badly decomposed meat? This is something scavengers do, and I did find this article on the spread of prions based on scavenger bird droppings: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904308/
This is a small, yet more widespread group to reference, but there are cases about people resorting to cannibalism in survival scenarios, and I can't find evidence of such individuals contracting Kuru. The same can be said about serial killers who have engaged in cannibalism with their victims, I have found no evidence of Kuru. A list of cannibalistic killers for reference: https://www.ranker.com/list/killers-who-ate-their-victims/ranker-crime
My very amateur guess would tell me that the more decomposition a meat has undergone, the higher chances for various cell mutations. Perhaps animals in the wild could acquire prions when they have been forced to scavenge on badly decomposed flesh to survive. I don't have enough information to back up this suspicion, and I imagine scientists analyzing the remains of a dead animal with prions might lead to the assumption that it was "infected during life" instead of the result of decomposing, because they weren't analyzing it from birth. In any case, I don't think eating extremely decomposed meat of any kind would be without serious health risks for humans, which is why I think the cannibal tribe of Papua New Guinea is more of a unique case regarding cannibalism. And if they are perpetuating the infection by eating their own infected, the same still stands that they are a unique case.
It would be unlikely to occur in such a situation because the people they are eating are not infected. It happens more often in cultures that practice cannibalism on the regular because at some point someone was infected so they actually transmit it to each other when they eat other cannibals. You probably couldn't get it by eating non cannibals.
after something is dead it's cells stop dividing so the chance for cell mutations would go to zero as does the chance of those cell mutations being passed on to the next generation. The problem with rotten meat in general is things like botulism and e-coli.
Alright so we seem to agree, my theories aside, that Kuru only happens when eating the infected.
When you say "It happens more often in cultures that practice cannibalism on the regular" I assume you are talking about other than the Papua New Guinea tribes? Can you tell me which groups you are referring to so I can look them up? Thanks!
I don't know of any modern cannibalistic societies outside of PNG. It is banned there like everywhere else but they still do it a little. Despite the lush forest the soil in PNG is not the best and not terribly productive so the people there are always short on food and that is one reason they culturally practice cannibalism, that is a lot of meat to throw away.
There is a lot of information about CWD which is a prion disease that affects deer species in North America if you want to learn more about them. Even that is not entirely understood.