Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/18/man-eats-squirrel-brains-gets.html
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"[Kentucky Doctors Warn Against a Regional Dish: Squirrels’ Brains.]
Squirrel Eaters?
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Nothing like a bucket of KFS and it’s 7 secret herbs and spices.
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Somebody’s going to catch Kuru and it is not going to be me.
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Mmmmm. Squirrel.
Data point - my folks are from rural KY. NO squirrel brains, no roadkill. Yeesh. Sounds like storytelling for the outsider. BTW, depending on NYT to distribute public health info to rural KY is a weak strategy.
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Even the most creative death metal bands haven’t come up with this horrifying scenario.
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Prions on the brain, nasty way to go, and probably why the squirrels were caught instead of healthy ones.
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I lived in rural KY for awhile and I’m very glad nobody ever offered me squirrel brains.
Moonshine, yes.
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Queue Mitch McConnell. jokes, starting … now …
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You literally beat me to this by 2 minutes.
I have family in Nebraska who would shoot and eat squirrel when they couldn’t find any deer… Don’t think they ate the brains though. I got the impression it was mostly the novelty of it…
Once, my step-grandfather gave me the tails of two butchered squirrels (I was about 6)… They were all stiff and a bit like feather dusters. I kept them on a shelf in my room until one day my dog ate them. Memories.
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Discussing this with a coworker, both from WV. Yeah, we’ve been there. I think we are OK. 
- It’s not a paper; it was a poster at a conference (different level of scrutiny).
- The authors managed to find five cases of CJD in six years, with only one case admitting to a history of skwirl-brainzz consumption. Despite the supposed popularity of skwirl brainzzz. This does not sound like a risk factor to me.
- People have been looking for evidence of spongeoform encephalopathy among the skwirls themselves for the last 20 years (since that wildly-speculative 1997 piece in the NYT), without finding any.
The 1997 report talked of investigating 11 cases, six of them fatal, but called for support on a paper that only mentioned five cases. Not reassuring.
UPDATE: The risk factors given for Case 4 in the present list were “Residence in UK, intake of dog food”.
DON’T DO THAT.
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Burgoo is pretty good. Although (AFAIK) I’ve only had it make from beef and pork. It’s very much a “whatever meat you have on hand” kinda thing. Uticah, IL has one such a festival every year, and the state park there is a super common place for people from the city and suburbs to come hike, picnic, fish, etc.
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Kinda raises the question of how the BCE got into the squirrel in the first place - I suspect cannibalism
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“do not eat squirrel brains” is a rule i can easily follow.
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