Feb 26th 2021, 13:41:39
Similar to mad cow eh?
You know basically any animal that eats the brains of it's own species gets a horrible nervous system disease. In New Guinea, there was a tribe (The Fore) that practiced cannibalism of their deceased family members still into the industrial era of the west.
What's sort of interesting is that when they would participate in a ritualistic cannibalism as a tribe. Essentially when a member of your family would die, cooking and eating them would help free their spirit from their body and give them to the gods. Women and children consumed the brain, while men of the family consumed the meaty tissue
What we discovered in their women and children was, perhaps months after eating a human brain, perhaps years, symptoms develop. It is always fatal. And symptoms last about a year before death. Symptoms include random outbursts of laughter (sometimes referred to as laughing disease), tremors, gradual loss of coordination from neurodegeneration, amd of course eventually death.
It's often believed the epidemic started when someone with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease was eaten. And subsequently this Kuru disease caused by eating someones brains who had spongiform encephalopathy, caused a long running epidemic of what should otherwise be known as "mad human disease."
In 1957, there were over 200 deaths in the tribe. And from 1957 when the disease was discovered by the west to about 2004 (yes you're reading that year correct) about 2700 people had died from this mad human disease. Local sources disagree that the last kuru death was either in 2005 or 2009 but they all kept eating their dead until very very recently despite breakthrough research about Kuru. The disease itself lingering was a product of incubation time. The practice of cannibalism was ended in the 60s, but the incubation time for Kuru can be 10, 20 or even 50 years. Once symptoms show up, you're dead within 14 months usually. But symptoms can take decades to show up. So, at least 45 years after the practice ended, you still had people dying in the mid 2000s from previously eating brains.
Interestingly, mad cow is also a product of a Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease infected cows brains being consumed by other cows. Similarly, chronic wasting disease in deer is caused by the same prion proteins. Again....caused by species on species brain nom noms. It's sort of disgusting and embarrassing to me that most cases of mad cow are caused by farmers feeding cow brains to other cows.
The easiest way to keep yourself safe is actually quite simple. Don't eat brains lol. As goofy as that sounds it's also true of mad cow disease which is for sure transmissible to humans. Only certain organs, primarily the brain, actually contain the folded protein. The disease itself is only found in certain tissues in the body, which range from the brain, lymph nodes, spinal cord, spleen, tonsils, eyes etc.
The reason why mad cow was such a problem for humans is that we tend to grind all that crap up into cheap cuts and jerky and hot dogs. One could almost assume the anecdotal transmission of CWD into humans is a product of some weirdo eating a spleen or something. It's just not a common practice with deer.
With both mad cow, and anecdotally CWD, you're generally safe from transmission should you not eat these tissues. And there is a simple problem. When a butcher uses the meat from a cow they tend to feed the bad parts of the cow back to the other animals thus mad cow. CWD, unfortunately, seems most widespread in communities of captive deer populations. It's likely that it spead from there into the wild, and so continued as food for deer increases in scarcity as the world industrialized. The harder it is for them to find wheat and grains, the more likely they are to engage in cannibalism for survival.
Tl:dr Dont eat brains. Dont get zombie diseases.
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