When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged • Hacker News Board

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#61

Post by pound » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #40

YCode wrote: post #3

I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept. Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.

> Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you. Unless you had a mind backup and a second body ready. Which, I think, all medicine ultimately aims, should aim, for; Why bother learning how to repair the single same body over and over (which won't help in unexpected catastrophic failures aka fatal accidents anyway) when you can just grow and jump into a new one?

Do you consider your copy to be you?

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#62

Post by maxerickson » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:07 PM UTC

grzm wrote: post #59

maxerickson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it respect. Do it in a factory and all of the sudden it is gross. There's pet foods that advertise on the TV that they don't contain any chicken byproduct meal. The horror of feeding a dog stuff it would be happy to eat.

make use of all of an animal This does not imply eating the entire animal.

What's your point? There's not actually any real problem with eating mechanically separated meat, it just makes for good TV to say that it isn't real food.

For style points, make a show of how bad it is the week before doing an episode on pâté.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#63

Post by jcoffland » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:10 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #47

adrianN wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions are nature's grey goo.

I would put bacteria in that role and call them green goo. One thing I find interesting is that gray goo would have to compete with bacteria for resources. I'm not sure that it would necessarily be easy.

Prions are not alive and therefore do not need to compete for resources to further their existence.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#64

Post by SerLava » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:11 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #4

Blueskytech wrote: post #2

Many of you have probably heard about Prions and Papua New Guinea but the end of the article discusses new prion diseases showing up in deer within North America. The idea that human's could get a prion disease from deer meat, coupled with a potentially long incubation period, is frightening. Living in a hunting community I may avoid eating deer for the foreseeable future.

it's highly unlikely... There's a (probably directed, weighted) graph of species-species transmission potential, and it does seem to obey some rough distance rule, which does NOT correlate necessarily with species distance rule. We think that cows can transmit to humans; cows and sheep can co-transmit. (if you have a sheep with scrapie sharing a pasture with cow, the cow can get mad cow disease). deer though do not s…

Hawaii too- there are a handful of deer and a ton of cows on the Big Island.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#65

Post by always_good » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:17 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #58

Shivetya wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMR and such, is that our famous pink slime that became all the rage/outrage awhile back? To the point we have quite a few establishments making it well known they never used such products. industrialization did not do any favors towards animals, especially in regards to processing and such for food

When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it respect. Do it in a factory and all of the sudden it is gross. There's pet foods that advertise on the TV that they don't contain any chicken byproduct meal. The horror of feeding a dog stuff it would be happy to eat.

They're right that industrialization did no favors for animals, but that's because of how animals are treated and farmed.

It's kind of like how I respect someone more for hunting a wolf with their bare hands vs someone that snipes them from a helicopter.

They both possibly result in a dead wolf, but that's not the point.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#66

Post by justboxing » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:29 PM UTC

touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat.

This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#67

Post by Razengan » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:32 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #55

Razengan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you. Unless you had a mind backup and a second body ready. Which, I think, all medicine ultimately aims, should aim, for; Why bother learning how to repair the single same body over and over (which won't help in unexpected catastrophic failures aka fatal accidents anyway) when you can just grow and jump into a new one?

While we have thousands of years of cultural belief that mind and body are distinct, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for that. And there is a lot of evidence that the mind is directly dependent on the state of the body--change the body (drugs, injury, etc) and inevitably the state of mind changes too. So I don't know of any reason to think that it's even possible to separate a mind from a body, let alone mov…

Just copy everything then.

There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#68

Post by Razengan » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:33 PM UTC

pound wrote: post #61

Razengan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you. Unless you had a mind backup and a second body ready. Which, I think, all medicine ultimately aims, should aim, for; Why bother learning how to repair the single same body over and over (which won't help in unexpected catastrophic failures aka fatal accidents anyway) when you can just grow and jump into a new one?

Do you consider your copy to be you?

Ah there's where it gets icky, but it's something for the philosophers to sort out. :)

As long as my copy has my memories up to that point, and the plans I had for the future from there on, it's as good as me.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#69

Post by metamet » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:35 PM UTC

thinkmassive wrote: post #33

touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

A workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.

Or purchase directly from a local farmer, where you can have an open dialogue about their meat raising and processing techniques. Farmers markets can be great for finding these relationships.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#70

Post by grzm » Mon, Apr 10, 2017, 8:37 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #62

grzm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

make use of all of an animal This does not imply eating the entire animal.

What's your point? There's not actually any real problem with eating mechanically separated meat, it just makes for good TV to say that it isn't real food. For style points, make a show of how bad it is the week before doing an episode on pâté.

Your inclusion of the statement regarding "mak[ing] use of all of an animal" is to show hypocrisy between respect for efficient use of animals by indigenous people and distaste for some industrial food processing practices. This is sloppy or disingenuous as they're different domains: one is efficient use of the animal for any purpose and the other is efficient use of the animal for food.

Similarly here you bring up mechanically separated meat, and in the comment I responded to, chicken byproduct meal in pet food. These are all food production, which is different from making efficient use of all of an animal for any purpose.

Editted to correct my confusing pâté and foie gras.