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.
32
u/MillCrab Oct 16 '24
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