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Comment by OldFatCactus | Hacker News Reader

I had project in college on Prions. Some interesting things I remember:

* Kuru (laughing disease) was transmitted from cannibalism. Women and children of the tribe were more likely to contract it because they were more often given the less palatable parts of the bodies, which included brains

* Some countries do not trust American cattle because our standards for Prion screening are too low

* Kentucky has issues with Prions because Squirrel brains are a popular dish

Try not to eat animal or human brains and you can dramatically reduce your chances of getting Prions

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Born and raised in Kentucky (Lexington). I've never heard of squirrel brains as a dish. That's an interesting tidbit. Would it be fair to guess that the parts of KY this is popular are on the south eastern part of the state on the border with West Virginia? All of the normal rules of everything are different when you're in Appalachia.

Here's some info from a quick google: http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/victim23.html

Looks like the dish is called Burgoo

> The center of the burgoo universe is Owensboro, Kentucky

Just when I thought my home state couldn't embarrass me more by being backwards...

Thanks!

Aw don't be embarrassed. It's a cool little bit of history. Growing up in the bible belt, I remember many charity events were accompanied by a stew. You could buy it by the quart. My local volunteer fire department made a stew twice a year and everyone in the community looked forward to it. My grandfather and father used to cook stews for my birthday. The act of cooking a stew was an all day affair and pretty fun by itself. Everyone would sit next to the stew cauldron and fire on a cold fall/winter day and take turns adding ingredients and stirring.

That group cooking is super cool.

I am going to arrange a family event where that happens.

I wouldn't be embarrassed. Those squirrels were probably wild caught (vs factory farmed), and the fact that they didn't waste the brain shows their resourcefulness.

Those are,after all, the same things we (rightfully) laud in the consumption of other types of more normative food animals. Just because it's a squirrel shouldn't change that.

EDIT: Added editorial wording to second paragraph.

Absolutely. Though as someone who has eaten squirrel (WV native. Yes it tastes like chicken.), I am amazed that someone took the time to get the brains out and eat them. It takes several squirrels to make a decent meal. I can't imagine how many it would take to have a substantial amount of what must be very small brains.

I've heard more about my home state's alleged consumption of squirrel brain outside the state than in it. And I have a couple kitschy KY cookbooks with recipes for burgoo, entirely rodent free. Every place will have hillbillies who eat odd game meat, if you search hard enough. KY just seems to be a popular target for this topic.

There’s a recipe in the new Appalachian cookbook by Ronnie Lundy, Victuals.

Clearly you contract the disease if you get behind on the salary to the black preacher.

Cooked goat and cow heads are a delicacy in some regions of Tunisia. Obviously, this includes the brain. I now wonder if Prions have ever been an issue in Tunisia...

http://n.neurology.org/content/35/6/894

Maybe it is an issue but goes underreported? Prions related diseases were historically easy to misdiagnose because they can present in so many different ways. I'm sure medical science has caught up in 1st world countries but maybe lags elsewhere?

Goat heads in Iceland too.

Calve's brains in Quebec.

A few questions:

* Do we have a good grasp on the number of prions in the world? My recollection from when MadCow became a big thing in the late 90s was that prions weren't even looked for and were hard to find as a general rule, but that was 20+ years ago. Might there be many common-but-harmless prions that we haven't even noticed?

* WHY is brain consumption (both in humans and in animals) such a source of prions? What makes that situation more likely to create prions?

I am not a doctor or scientist.

From what I remember on the topic, we do not have a good grasp on prions disease. There is a good chance that some other diseases in history may have actually been misdiagnosed prions disease. It can present as a form of dementia and the incubation period can be so long that many people are middle-aged before symptoms occur.

Tissue of the brain and spine are better for Prions propagation. Prions cause other proteins to misfold themselves. The proteins they affect are related to brain matter.

Get this... there is only one (1) prion protein! All mammalian prion diseases are directly related to the PRNP gene.

People talk about Mad Cow, Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jacobs, Chronic Wasting Disease, Scrapie, and a dozen other diseases like they are not all manifestations of the same underlying problem with PRNP gene variants.

Why are prion diseases typically brain diseases?

Or is that the only organ where they manifest in symptoms?

iirc they reproduce most rapidly in nervous tissue. thus brains have the highest concentration of them.

Wow, the Wikipedia page for Kuru says there’s a mutation of the Kuru prion that confers immunity to Kuru. That’s crazy to me, but makes sense from a selection perspective.

Also caused by a prion mutation is Fatal Familial Insomnia (F.F.I.).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653241

Eating sheep's brain is pretty common in certain parts of India

Is it a big issue out there?

If I've eaten sheeps brain twice myself, how soon should I plan my funeral?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052957/

iirc, incubation periods can be decades long. I believe the more you injest, the shorter the incubation period

The research article you linked to is for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, not variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Sporadic CJD has no link to brain consumption.

Honestly there’s a lot of fear mongering in this thread about brain consumption...if anything it’s healthy for you. The main issues are most likely when the animal eaten has participated in cannibalism. For example, Cows were fed bovine blood meal which is what led to the Mad Cow scare, kuru is caused by cannabilistic human tribes, squirrels are known to be cannibalistic, etc. Lamb/sheep don’t participate in cannibalism. No need for unnecessary fearmongering

Sheep suffer from Scrapie

Scrapie is a fatal, degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of sheep and goats. It is among a number of diseases classified as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). Infected flocks can experience significant production losses.

> Try not to eat animal or human brains

Now all I can think about is the dinner scene at the end of Hannibal.

One of the Indiana Jones movies featured a monkey brain dish... blech

I wonder if the correlation between prion diseases and brains indicates either:

1. Symptoms show up soonest in brains and so can be distinguished from other causes of impairment or death.

2. Humans already some immune mechanism that helps protect against prions, but brain tissue is particularly susceptible because of it's less-usual immune-system setup.

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