Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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Prions are a minor risk when you eat them. So, maybe don't grow tomatoes on the grave of your loved ones. Though, I suspect that would actually be perfectly safe since plants don't tend to pass other pathogens despite what we feed them (i.e. manure).

Otherwise, composting is the most natural thing there is. Absolutely everything in nature dies, and mostly does not get embalmed, cremated, etc. Which is another way of saying it composts and gets recycled back into living stuff; some of which ends up in our food chain. Things like proteins are broken down in the process. And that would include prions.

So, absolutely nothing wrong with composting the remains of people. It's a nice ecological alternative to carbon intensive cremation processes or having a lot of nasty embalming fluids dumped into the local environment (which is where it ends up after the body eventually decomposes anyway). Not judging here; but I appreciate people making different choices and being somewhat conscious about not burdening the environment with their corpses any more than is strictly necessary.

I'm not as quick to dismiss the risk. A brief read of the Wikipedia article on prions has some concerning claims:

> All known prion diseases in mammals ... are progressive, have no known effective treatment, and are always fatal

> In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

Source 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC33918/

Source 2: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2015/06/researchers-make-surp...

What makes you think that ordinary human bodies are somehow a source of prions or that their composted remains are somehow different from the composted remains of wild life that actually already is in our food chain? The whole thing is more than a bit far fetched. People eat fish, collect berries from forest, mushrooms, eat deer, rabbits, etc. That's all fine. How is this different? We even eat lifestock that have been know to occasionally have outbreaks of prion related deceases (sheep, cows, etc).

Well, Kuru is tied to cannibalism.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001379.htm

For CWD, You’re supposed to avoid eating anything that has come into contact with the brain, spine, or spinal fluid.

When livestock have an outbreak of a prion disease, they’re usually slaughtered and destroyed.

Searching for TSEs will garner you a lot of information if interested.

https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/tses/index.html

I think the point being made though is that CWD and other prion diseases are quite rare. Is there any danger from compost sourced from human bodies that died from non-prion-related diseases?

I'm certainly not an expert, but the Wikipedia article covers this as well:

> it is unusual for a prion disease to transmit from one species to another.

So I'd expect the risk to be higher when dealing with human remains.

There is a notable exception to this general rule:

> Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, however, is thought to be caused by a prion that typically infects cattle, causing bovine spongiform encephalopathy and is transmitted through infected meat

The other problem (mentioned by another poster) is that just because someone didn't die of a prion disease doesn't mean they aren't harboring prions because the incubation period is 5 - 20 years.

General comment: the risk may very well end up being low, but I would personally prefer to avoid consuming plants that were grown on composted human brain or spinal material to lower my personal risk.

Nevertheless, I've read some people in Africa have already evolved to become immune.

Embalming always seemed ridiculous to me.

Wasn't this merely part of a religious ritual?

My understanding is it was a moneymaker for the morticians, who managed to get laws passed requiring it.

I never knew and could never imagine this abominable thing is required by law.

Hardly. The religious ritual is just bury in the ground. I'm not sure it even involved even coffins originally.

I'd guess tomatoes are fine. I'd definitely think twice before eating carrots or potatoes from such a garden though, even washed and pealed thoroughly (and normally I wouldn't peal those.)

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