On cannibalism
Is it technically “safe” to eat human flesh, aka cannibalism? Like if you ate it, would it make you medically sick? Asking for a German guy I met on craigslist.
From a strictly food-safety standpoint, human meat is safe to consume. Let’s review:
Unlike lettuce or chicken, human meat isn’t a fantastic vector for the kind of bacteria that would make you sick. This means it’s reasonably safe to gnaw on a forearm al crudé (raw). This assumes that your cannibal-curious friend is a skilled butcher. There’s heaps of harmful bacteria in our gastrointestinal tracts that could make you sick if it intermingled with the choicer cuts. But your guy sounds like he has sharp tools and a clinical approach.
How about parasites? Fortunately, modern humans are typically parasite-free, so there’s not much risk of contracting one from cannibal activity.
Viruses? No major threat. I mean, it’s common sense to avoid meat originating from sick animals, so aim to eat this person shortly after their annual physical exam.
There’s just one risk to human cannibals — a disease called kuru. It was first discovered among populations that practiced cannibalism in New Guinea. Just like mad cow disease, Kuru is a prion disorder. Prions are basically microscopic zombies: they are neither distinctly alive nor dead and they can wait for years before ‘waking up’, at which point they infect everything around them and you can’t destroy them with heat or common disinfectants. (Prions are spooky.)
Back to kuru. You can only get kuru by eating the brains of someone who has the disease. In other words, you can only get kuru by cannibalizing a cannibal. (This is represented mathematically as can²)
But here’s the tricky part about kuru — if you get infected, you won’t show any symptoms for between ten and fifty years. It is possible, though not likely, that your German friend ate an infected brain in 1970 and has not yet manifested symptoms. In this case, you will also catch kuru, which sounds like a fun psychotropic drug but is actually an incurable and 100% fatal disorder.
In summary, do not eat the German.
Noted cannibal Ke$ha
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