17/04/2022
I've seen Prion diseases, like Kuru, brought up time and time again as possible zombie plague sources, but it ain't happening.
ANTHROPOPHAGY (part 2)
Is it safe to eat other people.
Yes, this is the post about kuru and prion disease that many people wanted to hear about.
Content warning: if the idea of consuming human flesh and descriptions of partaking in such acts turns your stomach, read no further.
But before we get into the potential dangers of eating human flesh, there is the super duper important question of how does human flesh taste? Well, there are conflicting reports on that. Some said that it tastes like monkeys and apes, which is not surprising since they are our closest relatives, giving a strong yet sweet taste. Others, like the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, claimed that it tastes like pork. Add to that that the expression long pig comes from a 19th century translation of a language of the Pacific rim to describe the consumption of human flesh. The explorer William Buehler Seabrook claimed in a 1934 account that human flesh looked like beef but had a taste similar to veal. The credibility of this statement has been put into question when he later confessed that the West African group he was living with never let him partake in anthropophagic rituals. One thing everyone agrees on is that children are more tender than adults. This is due to the fact that we produce less collagen as we age. We can see the effect in a diminution of collagen production in our skin that becomes drier and less elastic. The same thing happens to our flesh that becomes tougher as we age. All this to say that it’s hard to know how human flesh really tastes without a hands on approach
So is it safe to eat other people? The short answer is mostly yes. But... certain parts of a human being will not only make you sick if you eat them, it will kill you painfully. That brings us to the story of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea and the mysterious laughing disease that seemed to affect predominantly women and young children. The Fore used to practice transumption, the act of consuming the deceased (I will expand on that in a future post). After a waiting period of two to three days, Fore women would cut up, divide, share and eventually consume the body of the deceased. All of it would be consumed, the Fore would even dry the bones and crush them into a powder in order to be able to ingest them. That takes dedication.
At the beginning of the 20th century, reports of a strange new disease that seemed to affect mostly women started to appear. Those affected behaved oddly and sometimes started to laugh for no reason exhibiting tremors and dementia, this mysterious illness would invariably kill them. The Fore thought those isolated cases were caused by witchcraft. But eventually, the disease became epidemic among the Fore and they eventually reached out for help to the Australian authorities that were in charge of Papua New Guinea at the time. A virologist and a medical doctor, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek and Vincent Zigas, started to investigate the disease in 1957. From the beginning, anthropophagy was thought to be linked to the disease, but the intial assessment of the two researchers led them to believe that the cause might be genetic and not influenced by the cultural practices of the Fore. It's not until 1967 that anthropophagy was considered to be the main cause of kuru. The Australian government had already banned the practice and the cases of kuru were in decline. At this point, researchers started to suspect that prions (misfolded proteins) were involved in kuru.
To test this hypothesis, Gajdusek started to experiment on chimps. The details of these experiments are somewhat gruesome but the results confirmed that kuru was a prion disease, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) akin to Creuztfeld-Jakob disease and mad cow disease. Prion diseases can take decades before presenting itself, so there has been reported cases of kuru until 2000 of thereabouts. Since TSE affects the brain and nervous system of the infected individual, eating these body parts will infect you. Among the Fore, it was mostly women and young children who ate the brain of the deceased, they were mostly affected by kuru.
For his discovery, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize of physiology and medicine in 1976. He also pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation in 1997 for which he served only 12 months. He freely admitted to the facts and was also a fan of in**st.
Stay tuned for more posts on anthropophagy.
TLDR: Eating the brain and the nervous system of dead people is a bad idea. You can also be a Nobel Prize winner and a complete do*****ag.
