I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
If you developed a taste for human flesh, I would suggest you choose only healthy subjects, and avoid eating the brain!
There is a disease called Kuru that is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that was found inthe highland of Papua New Guinea in the Fore tribe that was passed on because of their cannibalism. Kuru is a degenerative neurological disease very similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (also known as mad cow disease). Its caused by something called a prion, which is basically a protein in a misfolded form. This prion makes its way to the brain of the host (in this case the cannibal) and causes other healthy proteins to fold into the misshapen form. These prion proteins accumulate in the brain tissue causing damage and eventually cellular death. A prion is a degenerative disease, so the disease process just gets worse over time until the host (person infected) dies.
But a prion like Kuru would not be the only possible disease you could get if you ate other humans. It would be like eating any other meat (because really, thats all we are). If the meat was not prepared correctly you would run the risk of food poisoning from bacteria like Salmonella species and Escherichia coli. Parasites might also be possible if the human being eaten was infected with them.
It would be the same for other animals eating their own species – it would be possbile to get diseases from eating them. the greatest risk would come from eating an animal that was sick before it was killed for eating.
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You can certainly get diseases from eating animals of the same, or even different species! Two good examples of this are Mad Cow and Foot-and-Mouth disease, where cattle become infected by eating food containing bits of other infected cow. Not many studies have been done looking at cannibalism in humans, because it is not very widespread, but one study was done in America in 2007. They didn’t look at real cannibals, but they used a model that took information that they knew about diseases that would be transmitted in meat, and predator-prey interactions, and used it to estimate how likely it was. They came to the conclusion that it would be rare for people to get diseases just from eating other people, and for diseases to spread in this way, because more than one person would have to eat the dead human, and cannibalism is usually a one-on-one meal, not a group meal.
Some people think that there might be an increased chance of catching diseases from eating people, because some diseases only affect humans, but I think many of these would be able to be caught in other ways too.
Parasites and bacteria can be transmitted via flesh as well, though cooking properly tends to kill them off. Still, some diseases, like those caused by the prions Kym mentioned, easily infect people if they are eaten. Either way, you’d probably get into a bit of trouble if you tried eating someone, so I probably wouldn’t recommend it any time soon. Stick to pork instead!
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I hope you’re not thinking about having any of your fellow classmates for lunch…
I wouldn’t recommend it. Most human body parts would be just like that of a cow, pig or sheep, so you could technically eat it. But indeed what Kym said, mad cow disease is a problem!
Most proteins will be broken down in the stomach by stomach acid. But prions are small proteins that survive the acid stomach environment and can infect you almost likea virus. But Kym has explained it perfectly!
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