[UA] cannibalism

[Scott Jenks]

My god, what is it about cannibalism that brings out the BS?

Stalingrad: lets see....people living in a besieged city for months without sanitation, starving to death and they have bad skin and smell bad? Yep, must be the taint of evil on the cannibal. probably caused by "hormones" or something.

As some people have mentioned kuru, CJD, and mad cow disease (BSE) are all prion diseases. CJD is a genetic disease that spread to other people through medical devices (there is also a hereditary prion disease that causes you to die from insomnia-scary), BSE spread from sheep to cows to people through the food chain, kuru was caused by traditional funerary practices but I think those have  been abandoned in recent times. Prion diseases are caused by a protein that is folded wrong and is able to convert properly folded versions of the protein to a misfolded state. These misfolded proteins accumulate and eventually start killing nerves cells and poking holes in your brain.

kuru- There is no victim or "leftovers", the cannibalism was ritual cannibalism of the dead as a sign of respect (sort of having them live on inside you). I'm not sure but it might of been women and children who did the rites and thus suffered from the disease.  Gustatory cannibalism (eating people as food) outside of emergency situations is very rare- it is the sort of thing anthropologist argue about. Most cannibalism is either during famines, done by crazy people or ritual cannibalism.

Scott Jenks


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "deaths toe" <deaths_toe at hotmail.com>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 3:18 PM
Subject: RE: [UA] cannibalism and stuff.


> This seems so strangely ironic to me.  A cannibal eats Stuff that exists in
> the brain only to have that same brain stuff to damage the eater's brain.
> 
> Maybe it isn't so ironic.  Maybe it's the victim's brain's last attempt at
> fighting back, some sort of last ditch survival instinct kicking in.  There
> could be much more to this than 'simple' prions and hormones.
> 
> DT
>

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