• JayDee@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Said this on another comment: eating human meat does not increase your chance of prions. If you eat another human with prions disease, then you get it. But if you don’t eat prion-infected meat, you don’t get prions.

    We eat deer, which also get prions. We also eat cow, which also get prions (mad cow disease, which also infects humans). We avoid getting prions with regulation of those markets. We could do exactly the same in this scenario.

    • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      4 hours ago

      eating human meat does not increase your chance of prions

      Tell that to victims of kuru.

      We eat deer

      No, I most definitely don’t.

      which also get prions

      I don’t think “get” is the right word. We gave them prions when we put them together with sheep with scrapie to see if it could be transmitted to deer. Which it could. And by “we” I mean humans, but specifically the USA, because of course it was the USA. Probably trying to make biological weapons. Well, congratulations, I guess, fantastic success there.

      We avoid getting prions with regulation of those markets

      No we don’t. Capitalism ensures that we get regular outbreaks of human transmitted mad cow disease (which at some point would start spreading from human to human and kill us all, if CWD didn’t get us first), and the deer stuff is completely unregulated (and will become even worse with that raving orange lunatic in the white house).

      It’s a matter of time (probably less than five years, given the collapsing state of the USA) before it starts spreading to humans and becomes an unstoppable pandemic that’ll kill us all.

      The only reasonable course of action would be to nuke all affect areas until every square centimeter of the ground turns to glass, but we aren’t going to do that, because we care more about short term profit and optics than about the inevitable extinction of the human race.

      • JayDee@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 hours ago

        Did you read anything about kuru beforehand? It’s contracted by ritual eating in general rites. They also have no means of diagnosing prion infection in a corpse, which is why people would eat brain tissue with prions. It didn’t spontaneously form in those victims, it was in the corpse. Overall, it could be avoided by just not eating infected meat, hence why Papua New Guinea did not collapse from kuru - it was rare to get it, and once the mode of transmission was known, it was much easier to avoid.

        Chronic wasting disease was first observed in deer in the 1960s, and there is nothing actually confirming it’s exact origin. it was first noted in deer herds being researched in Colorado, and as far as I am reading, it did not jump from sheep to deer.

        We do actually regulate mad cow disease, going as far as culling entire herds of livestock and disposing of the meat. Outbreaks happen, yes, but we are keeping that spread down. This is also in meat that we sell at an insane scale, one which would not be replicatable with human meat without slavery.

        With human donated meat, it’s very unlikely you would get prions. Again, you are way more likely to get it from cow meat and deer meat.