Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/22/study-tracking-people-who-ate.html
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Isn’t autopsy the only reliable way to know if someone is infected with prions?
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“So far” means nothing: decades may pass after infection before the effects of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies manifest themselves.
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Have they tried saying, “Well, it looks like you’re going to be okay…” while turning their back to the patient to put their stethoscope/medical tricorder/magical stick back into their little black bag?
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Looking at one group that ate one infected deer is like tracking one family in the UK that ate contaminated beef during Mad Cow. Millions of families ate beef during that era and about 200 people got vCJD. I’d assume it would be the same here. Luckily people don’t eat deer on the scale of beef and infection rates among deer aren’t close to what they were in UK cattle in the 1990s when recycling brain matter for feed was normal.
The important thing is not to get any of the zombie brains in with the meat when you rend the deer. Prions can still lurk in any nerve tissue but avoiding the brain/spine/eyes is critical, and probably why so many can eat infected animals and not get the disease.
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Came here to post this. Prions are slow actors, and symptoms initially, years later, look like dementia. Based on our experience with both mad cow and kuru, i think caution is the better part of valor.
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I would guess as long as you don’t eat the brains, you probably won’t get the illness. The prions are concentrated there. Typically brain and spinal chord are removed now in beef processing (I hope), since this is the suspected cause of the mad cow epidemic in Britain.
You might think “well, who’s going to eat brains anyhow?” but in winter survival situations there are valid reasons for eating animal brains, they have more fat than other parts of the mammal, and you need that fat to survive cold weather. Thankfully most of us won’t be in that position.
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It’s not just for winter. A diet that is high in lean meat and lacks fat can kill you.
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Deer are ungulates? My God, when did that happen?
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Not just ungulates: even-toed ungulates:
“The roughly 220 land-based even-toed ungulate species include pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, camels, llamas, alpacas, mouse deer, deer, giraffes, antelopes, sheep, goats, and cattle. Many of these are of great dietary, economic, and cultural importance to humans.”
Update: As to when this happened:
“The oldest fossils of even-toed ungulates date back to the early Eocene (about 53 million years ago). Since these findings almost simultaneously appeared in Europe, Asia, and North America, it is very difficult to accurately determine the origin of artiodactyls. The fossils are classified as belonging to the family Dichobunidae; their best-known and best-preserved member is Diacodexis .[2] These were small animals, some as small as a hare, with a slim build, lanky legs, and a long tail. Their hind legs were much longer than their front legs. The early to middle Eocene saw the emergence of the ancestors of most of today’s mammals.”
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Zombies. Eating brains. Turning into a zombie after eating brains. It all makes sense.
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Totally… but I was referencing Daryl occasionally hunting squirrels on the show…
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Yeah as far as i know people want to stay the hell away from animals that are suffering from prions. Cooking won’t due anything to get rid of it either, i recall posting about it before but prion molecules will even survive being put into an autoclave
Under certain conditions the effectiveness of autoclaving actually declines as the temperature is increased. The small resistant subpopulations that survive autoclaving are not inactivated by simply re-autoclaving
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When Brexit.
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no ill-effects, so far
Bare backing road kill into your body isn’t very smart…
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I’ve had brains a couple of times, in the early/mid eighties, before the mad cow thing.
Quite tasty. Used to be a local speciality here and there, not unlike sweetbreads or tongue.
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Same here. Was delicious 
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