11–20 of 24 posts
If a prion infected livestock is processed and consumed completely by us, we'd still probably have some infections, but far less than the entire population of a country eating infected meat that has been eating prion infected meat all the time.
My takeaways from quickly skimming the article: - not that many prion diseases among brain eating people surprisingly (but are statistics accurate? what if they develop later?) - perhaps because our ancestors did it, human DNA has a gene that "protects" from prion diseases somehow. didn't know that could be a thing!
From the cited paper [1], what actually makes the difference is having your two copies of a specific gene (one from each parent) differ from one another in a few specific, relatively common ways.
I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this? Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this sub…
Can you elaborate on what you mean by not seeming reviewed?
I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this? Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this sub…
There are many kinds of prions capable of causing spongiform encephalopathy in humans and likely others which are currently undiscovered. To suggest we continue eating brains because some people "probably have an immunity" is irresponsible. To my knowledge, evidence of immunity to prion disease has not been scientifically established.
Edit: Furthermore, prion diseases can have long incubation periods (years or decades before symptoms manifest), making them extremely difficult to detect in normal clinical settings.
I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this? Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this sub…
Because prion disease is close to irrelevant, as long as you don't feed the brains back to the animal it's from.
Disappointing this tells us scientists "established" the harm of dietary cholesterol in the 50s without mentioning that it was a mistake. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had to admit this around 10 years ago.
Eating anything coming out of that pipeline is probably not that great of an idea, but organ meats are the least advisable portion.
I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this? Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this sub…