- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/45979966
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No because we’d get prion disease like Creutzfeldt-Jakob and others.
Check out prions if you are not hospital fobiac.
You can just check the human for prion disease before slaughtering, like we do with other meat.
That’s not how it works, you don’t “check food for prions” lol.
Yes, you check the brain tissue of the animal.
You have no idea how dangerous and complicated that is.
It’s actually not that complicated.
You check for the disease and if you find it, you don’t eat the meat. Problem solved.
Prion disease is not something special to humans or cannibalism. It is however a disease that needs a long time to develop, which is why it’s rare is most animals we eat (because they don’t tend to live that long). With cannibalism, people often eat old people (and humans tend to get quite old), which have a much higher chance of having developed prion disease. That’s really the only reason why it’s associated with cannibalism.
So you can totally live on cannibalism and not get prion disease if you either apply normal food safety standards or focus on eating kids.
I would like to add that there is a reason we banned feeding cattle with animal by-products rather than solely relying on screening slaughtered animals. There are limitations in screening animals. False negatives, especially in young, early stage, asymptomatic cases of disease (they are still transmitting abnormal proteins). Screening every slaughtered individual would also be very costly. So we don’t.
You want a combination of preventative measures. Best to break the food chain transmission vector. Cannibals have a circular food chain and it’s not obvious who is a carrier. That is an issue.
If you wanna be sure to not get mad cows disease or whatever; don’t eat meat. And especially avoid eating things that have been engaging in cannibalism.
Ooh you just, … checks notes … “Check for the disease”.
Aah that sounds so simple!
“Just check the meat bro” “how hard can it be bro”
Lol
Yeah you’d need like … an average laboratory for that. Impossible, no one has those!
Strangely, the question is “How long could the human race survive on only cannibalism?” A pretty specific question.
But the video is titled “Could we survive eating only humans?” Which is a completely different question, because it allows the interpretation that the humans “we” are eating can eat whatever. It brings to mind the humans of Ringworld that had to fill in all of the niches of other animals.
