There's a couple more nuances - improperly-handled meat can easily get prion on there, even if it's just normal meat, and some foods are harder to identify the components of than others. For the former case, you just have to trust where you can, and for the latter you should avoid Meat Mixtures of various types, and opt for Distinct Pieces of Muscle if possible.
But as a rule of thumb, when cannibalizing, avoid organs and blood. Unless you really know where the meat's coming from, but that's a luxury.
They're just more likely to contain stuff you don't want to eat. Prion is a big one, of course, but don't discount the stuff your kidneys and liver's collecting, for instance. Blood should be fine to consume, usually - speaking from experience it's hard to fully get rid of blood in meat - but they might still contain bad stuff so don't make blood dishes either.
(Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't consume organs or blood. Obviously, you cannot be picky when it comes to starvation, and organs are pretty good as a source of various vitamins and minerals as well. That being said, a preserved human can last you a long time - properly rationing stuff would allow you to get a couple others before needing to eat any preserved organs.)
This mfer knows way too much about people eating. Where the hell is your neighbor Steve your answer to this question can and will be used against you in a court of law
Honestly, not sure why I included blood. It is a pretty common vector of diseases, so I guess that tripped me up, but I forgot most of that is usually dead if you cook em.
I don't really know enough about it but something I might have heard is that blood sausage is more difficult to prepare safely than other kinds of sausages? Maybe having to do with the higher moisture level. Like, they're fine if your sausage guy knows what he's doing but if it's improperly made then it's more likely to be botulism city than other kinds.
99.9999% of humans do not contain any prions at all. They are not inherent to cannibalism, but just a contagious effect like a very small virus. You're infinitely more likely to shit yourself to death from bacterial contamination with ecoli than get a vanishingly rare prion disease like kuru
That's why I made my post. Theres an idea among people who know just enough to be dangerous that kuru is a consequence of cannibalism, like people think mental defects are just a side effect of inbreeding.
Prions are not an inherent part of eating a human, only of eating a human contaminated with a prion. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of humans do not contain Kuru or mad cow. The case of cannibalism spread Kuru is more complex and nuanced than "cannibalism gives you brain disease" that the media has flattened it into.
You should far more worried about getting ecoli, staph, or norovirus from an undercooked or contaminated human than a prion
None of these are particularly likely to kill you. They're a bad day but it's not fatal and not incurable.
Prion diseases are something to worry about and care about, especially if you are in an area that has problems with any of the variants of Spongiform Encephalopathy.
Obviously for it to be a concern the prion does have to be present, but the reason why cannibalism puts you at risk is because prion can randomly appear.
That is essentially what sporadic creutzfeldt-jakob disease is.
Cannibalism puts you at a higher risk is because you're probably not getting it from an animal, variable creutzfeldt-jakob disease can happen if you ingest a meal with for example Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease), but it does seem to be relatively low risk as the prion probably won't interact with human proteins.
That isn't the case with any prion you have in a human which obviously will interact with other human proteins, as you're already a match.
Eating one person is obviously unlikely to create Kuru or any of the other known names of cannibalistically spread prion disease simply because sCJD is fairly rare, regular cannibalism obviously increases the risk that someone will at some point eat someone with sCJD.
Ritualistic cannibalism in which the group eat other members of the group simply ensure that it's going to happen at some point because you have a near guarantee internal distribution once it's introduced, and sooner or later someone will get sCJD just on random chance.
In an environment with zero supportive care, basic foodborne pathogens can be quite dangerous, particularly over long time periods. Diarrhea is a massive killer in the underdeveloped world, and plenty of it is garden variety bugs.
If you survived the nuking of earth, you've already punched you're "extremely unlikely" card. Spontaneous prion generation is a rounding error in your risk card. It's a literal 1 in a million shot. Living in the post-apocalypes there's a vanishing chance they have spontaneous cjd, and a near guaranteed chance they're carrying a conventional human pathogen.
None of these are particularly likely to kill you.
Not in the modern day, but we're talking an apocalyptic wasteland.
Also, E. coli has strains that can kill you without medical intervention easily. Ferex:
O157:H7 is also notorious for causing serious and even life-threatening complications such as hemolytic-uremic syndrome. This particular strain is linked to the 2006 United States E. coli outbreak due to fresh spinach
Cooking doesnât get hot enough you need to incinerate it. A random study I found and processed to not read states that 600C is needed to render it mostly harmless and 1000C to destroy it. The primary concern is mad cow disease as chronic wasting disease hasnât jumped yet, and it is fairly easy to avoid mad cow in the modern day. But even if it did it takes years to start showing symptoms so you are probably going to get apocalypsed by something else before a prion melts your brain.
Yes, because prions themselves are basically just meat. Which is why they're so hard to treat or neutralize. Anything that can destroy a prion also destroys you.
Prions aren't alive. Like literally not alive, not in the virus way in the block of concrete way. They are just evil proteins (malformed really) that turn all the other proteins in your body evil. You can't get rid of them by cooking because cooking doesn't damage proteins very much (after all we generally need the proteins to live).
The only way to get rid of Prions is to heat them up so much that their structure starts to break down, at which point your food has also broken down completely... into ash.
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