Human Cannibalism.

[Diablo]

(10-01-2013 01:04 PM)Aseptic Skeptic Wrote:  

(10-01-2013 12:20 PM)Diablo Wrote:  Why would it be unhealthy? Meat is meat....

No reason your diet can't include human flesh.

Diseases are not an issue, that is why we have fire.

Wrong. Read what I wrote above. Or this: All meat might carry diseases. Eating human flesh adds to the list of diseases, so meat isn't meat since human flesh has more possible diseases than any other. And as I said above, cooking is not a preventative measure.

Also consider this:

Prions, the infectious agent of CJD, may not be inactivated by means of routine surgical instrument sterilization procedures. The World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that instrumentation used in such cases be immediately destroyed after use; short of destruction, it is recommended that heat and chemical decontamination be used in combination to process instruments that come in contact with high-infectivity tissues.

So when a doctor uses instruments on a victim of CJD, he should destroy those instruments. If not, he should use both heat and chemical sterilization.

Also consider that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) is a bovine prion disease extremely similar to CJD. Simply cooking the beef was found insufficient to decontaminate the meat. The UK slaughtered (without processing any of them for food) over 4 million cows to eradicate the disease.

So fire or no fire, this disease is a very big issue; simply cooking infected meat is not enough.

Assuming that the list of diseases is larger. What are we talking about a few %?
Rare disease are rare, eating any meat has some danger involved.

meat is meat

[Aseptic Skeptic]

Maybe.

But most of the stuff you might get from other meat will give you indigestion or a parasite. Human flesh just might kill you. And it's evidently fairly common among cannibals. Not a tiny chance, but a significant one. And since cooking the meat will get rid of most any other problem but will not get rid of CJD, there is much you can do to avoid issues with other meat but not as much to avoid the killer issue with human meat.

So if by "meat is meat" you mean it's all the same amount of risk, you're clearly wrong. I suggest you fry up some pork and pretend it's your neighbor instead of going for the real thing; you'll likely live longer.

[Misanthropik]

I'd try it.

Just gonna throw that out there.

[BryanS]

What? Nobody up for some soylent green?

[Diablo]

As far as I know we don't even allow slaughterhouses to produce animal meat from animals that died of unknown reasons.

At least they aren't supposed to. I know I wouldn't knowingly eat them...

[Chas]

(13-01-2013 06:37 PM)Diablo Wrote:  As far as I know we don't even eat animals that have died of unknown reasons. At least they aren't supposed to. I know I wouldn't knowlingly eat them...

I have never eaten any human that died of unknown reasons.