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Comment on Could we survive eating only humans?

remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

It’s actually not that complicated. You just don’t have a clue what you’re taking about.

You check for the disease and if you find it, you don’t eat the meat. Problem solved.

Prion disease is not something special to humans or cannibalism. It is however a disease that needs time to develop, which is why it’s rare is most animals we eat (because they don’t tend to live that long). With ritualistic cannibalism, people often eat old people (and humans tend to get quite old), which have a much higher chance of having developed prion disease. That’s really the only reason why it’s associated with cannibalism.

So no, you can totally live on cannibalism and not get prion disease if you either apply normal food safety standards or focus on eating kids.

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Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Ooh you just, … checks notes … “Check for the disease”.

Aah that sounds so simple!

“Just check the meat bro” “how hard can it be bro”

Lol

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- remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah you’d need like … an average laboratory for that. Impossible, no one has those!
  
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  - Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Then melt all your material because of prion disease. No biggie.
    
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RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I would like to add that there is a reason we banned feeding cattle with animal by-products rather than solely relying on screening slaughtered animals. There are limitations in screening animals. False negatives, especially in young, early stage, asymptomatic cases of disease (they are still transmitting abnormal proteins). Screening every slaughtered individual would be very costly.

You want a combination of preventative measures. But best to break the food chain transmission vector. Cannibals have a circular food chain. That is an issue.

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