Hi! Wanna share your research on cannibalism? I literally know nothing on the subject. So if you have time, I’d love to learn more.
hi!!! i absolutely do want to share my research because this has been fascinating me for days. this is also likely not edited and just comes from my brain, so if something is confusing/incomprehensible/incorrect please tell me and i’ll do my best to fix it
to anyone who might see this: please don’t hesitate to tell me if you want a tag or another trigger warning on this post or the other (although i might end up making a blog for this type of stuff? my friends can only hear so much about epidemiology and cannibalism science and all that so tell me what you think about me making a sideblog for my interests). trigger warning for cannibalism, death, sickness, ulcers, necrosis, pus
The biggest issue with cannibalism come in the form of prions. Prions are made of a protein called PrP, which is found in perfectly healthy people. PrP^C is the normal protein that’s found in cell membranes (we don’t really know what PrP does, but it might have to do with the brain’s cell to cell communication). The infectious form of PrP is PrP^Sc (called a prion). Prions happen when PrP proteins fold over themselves, which messes up how the proteins connect to each other. Usually, your body will use enzymes to break down proteins, which would fix this problem, but prions are very much resistant to them. Prions also don’t have nucleic acid (DNA/RNA). Prion diseases can be hereditary, infectious, or sporadic (so they can run in the family, or you can contract them, or your PrP just decides one day to fold itself into a prion).
Cannibalism has to do more with the infectious prions. Prions, once they happen, start affecting other proteins like some really messed up game of group tag, causing them to fold and become prions as well, causing clumps of misfolded proteins in your brain (remember how I said they might have to do with brain communication? what we do know is that prion diseases really mess up your brain. i think prions can also be found in the nervous system as well so do with that what you will). From what I remember, these prion clumps can also damage and/or kill nerve cells, which leads to your brain getting these small holes, and becomes somewhat akin to a sponge when looked at under a microscope (prion diseases are also known as “spongiform encephalopathies” for a reason). The thing is, spongy brains with holes in them also means majour brain damage, which is seen in the symptoms.
Speaking of prion disease symptoms, they are very much not fun (i looked these up btw, i haven’t memorised the specific symptoms yet). They progress, starting smaller and creating minor inconveniences, to progressing enough to be debilitating. There are:
Memory issues and dementia
Difficulty walking/balancing
Behaviour/psychological changes
Hallucinations
Muscle stiffness/loss of muscle control
Seizures
Vision problems
Confusion
Fatigue
Insomnia
Difficulty speaking/swallowing
I know what you might be thinking. “I want a specific example of a time cannibalism lead a prion disease enough to be an epidemic like you said in one of your other answers to an ask.” Well, welcome to kuru (which means “to shake” in the Fore language), a disease that ravaged through the Fore people of Papua New Guinea (who had a cultural practice of funerary cannibalism) and their neighbours. This epidemic peaked in the 1950s, when 2% of all Fore deaths were because of kuru (hitting women and children the hardest). At this time, it was the leading cause of death among women in the Fore. The fact it was only 2% of all deaths makes it seem small, but some villages “became almost devoid of women” (this quote is from an article from medical news today that i used to get the kuru symptoms and information, and it’s a really interesting read! https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/311277#Symptoms-of-kuru). The reason it hit women and children the hardest was because they were the ones who would prepare the bodies; also, men believed that, during conflict, eating human meat could weaken them, so they consumed less than women and children. Kuru has a pretty long asymptomatic period that lasts years, but once symptoms present themselves they progress much faster and can kill in only a couple months (symptoms can be present for up to two years before death, although that’s still less than half the time of the incubation period, if not 1/10 of the time). Once symptoms appear, there are three stages of symptom progression a person goes through.
1. When symptoms are inconveniences:
Headaches
Joint pain
Shaking
Loss of balance
Speech deterioration
Loss of muscle control
2. When symptoms have bigger effects:
Inability to walk
Loss of muscle coordination
Severe tremors
Emotional instability (depression with outbursts of uncontrollable laughter)
3. When symptoms become severe
Inability to sit without support
Little to no muscle coordination
Inability to speak
Difficulty swallowing
Unresponsive to surroundings
Ulcerations (which will have necrosis, which is tissue death, and pus)
Symptoms lead to death, though the cause of death is usually pneumonia or severely infected pressures. This is no longer an issue for the Fore people, as the the practice was reduced. Kuru is likely extinct, and the last person is thought to have died from it in 2005.
So prion diseases have only had one epidemic, and they’re relatively rare, so why are they an issue? It’s because they can’t be cured, and (at this point in time) will always be fatal. They can be slowed, but symptoms will continue to progress. Remember how prions don’t have nucleic acid? This means they’re also resistant to radiation that would normally destroy/inactivate these types of things when enzymes might not be able to. There are usually about 350 new cases of prion diseases every year, so all things considered, they’re not common. However, cannibalism would almost certainly up the numbers. Cannibalism being a cultural practice is of course a more difficult subject, but I’m more here for the science.
Note to people who might read this and might want to comment about how “cannibalism would fix overpopulation tho” or “oh cannibalism is so horrible and bad how could someone do that”: personally, the morality behind whether or not cannibalism is “good” or “bad” doesn’t especially matter to me since science has shown negative effects, so please don’t bring any of that onto this post.
