A piece of geeky brilliance, reprinted from McSweeneys, one of my favourite websites:
Illnesses Whose Victims May Not Be Safely Eaten
1. Rabies
2. Chickenpox
3. Leukemia
4. Tuberculosis
5. The common cold
6. Hodgkin's disease
7. Hepatitis*
8. Leprosy
9. Crohn's disease**
10. Mono (aka mononucleosis, the Epstein-Barr virus, the kissing disease)
11. AIDS
12. Influenza
13. Malaria***
14. Herpes (genital or oral)
15. SARS
Illnesses Whose Victims May Be Safely Eaten
1. Color blindness
2. Tourette's syndrome
3. Alzheimer's disease
4. Breast, thyroid, liver, and prostate cancers****
5. Asthma
6. HIV
7. Cholera*****
8. Chlamydia*****
9. Syphilis*****
10. Diphtheria*****
11. Muscular dystrophy
12. Tinnitus
13. Type 2 diabetes
14. Parkinson's disease
15. Homesickness
(By Maryam Akbari and Sean Michaels)
Footnotes, see below.
* It may be safe to consume a victim of hepatitis if you carefully avoid the liver.
** At one time, it was believed that Crohn's disease was a genetic disorder and thus its victims were safe to devour. Recent studies, however, suggest that Crohn's is an infectious environmental bacteria, linked to Johne's disease, which infects ruminants. If this is correct, victims of Crohn's may not be safely consumed.
*** It may be safe to consume a victim of malaria if the blood is drained and the liver is avoided.
**** Victims may not be consumed if cancer was induced by hepatitis virus.
***** Slight chance that these diseases would infect through the mouth/esophagus mucosa before they could be destroyed by the acidity of the stomach. Thus, their victims could not be said to be "safe."
Medicine & Health
Life Science
Comments
Not even when char-broiled?
Posted by: coturnix | October 26, 2007 12:33 PM
I am perplexed... it's "safe" to eat someone with HIV but not with AIDS? I'm not buying it, and it seriously undermines my faith in the rest of the list.
Posted by: Laura | October 26, 2007 1:38 PM
Leukemia is transmissable through the GI tract? That sounds.. um.. not correct. Maybe a lentiviral-induced leukemia (not that humans have those), but I can't believe that ordinary leukemic cells could somehow survive the stomach, cross the mucosa, find a blood vessel, and home to the bone marrow.
And they left CJD/kuru off the cannibal list - that one should have been number one.
Posted by: Brian | October 26, 2007 1:45 PM
To follow up on Laura's comment, cholera is a GI-transmitted disease normally, so I can't believe it would be safe to eat a cholera victim. This list is crap.
Posted by: Brian | October 26, 2007 1:48 PM
Also, there is good evidence that prion diseases like Alzheimer's can be transmitted via cannibalism. Early studies of Kuru, an esoteric disease that was prevalent among some tribes in Papua New Guinea, showed that the neurodegenerative disease was contagious via ingestion. While the same has not been shown for Alzheimer's as far as I know, I don't think we can assume that it's safe.
more info...
http://www.med.harvard.edu/publications/On_The_Brain/Volume06/Number3/madcow.html
Posted by: Noam | October 26, 2007 1:58 PM
This is actually very interesting. It's like this post is turning into a great teaching anecdote on the process of peer review.
Maybe the difference between HIV and AIDS is the possibility that the individual is infected with something else?
Posted by: David Ng | October 26, 2007 2:01 PM
Well of course you can eat someone with HIV and several other diseases if a proper barrier method is used correctly.
Posted by: natural cynic | October 26, 2007 3:39 PM
This makes no sense. Most of the eating of humans that one would be doing, I'd assume, would be the muscle, which would also be cooked. Cooked muscle tissue would render even most of the diseases in category 1 "safe for eating." I suppose if you're talking raw brains and organs (and intestine?) that's a different matter, but think of all the infectious agents the cows and pigs we eat probably had. I mean, c'mon, "the common cold?" That's ridiculous.
Posted by: Tara C. Smith | October 26, 2007 3:50 PM
Most of this is nonsense. Cholera is usually water or foodborne. Diphtheria colonizes the oropharynx, syphilis can infect the mouth and throat, too, etc., etc. And leukemia? Crohn's? Hodgkins? This pair of lists is total bullshit.
Posted by: revere | October 27, 2007 9:23 AM
Yeah! How dare the authors of this humor list deploy terms and ideas that aren't scientifically accurate! I mean, if you're gonna eat another person, a perfectly sensible thing to do, a perfectly sensible kind of inquiry, right?, you better do the math. That's all I'm saying. I just get so tired of these humorists, writing for humor sites, acting like scientific fidelity might not be the purpose of their piece, acting as if the conceit was to posit some near future scenario where a conversation on who you should and should not eat was actually plausible and normal, that that was more in-line with their purpose. Oh does it steam me up!
I think Coturnix and Natural Cynic and maybe (though I can't tell) Tara are with me. And I agree, Bora, I mean, if you char-broil them, things should be okay. Maybe use one of those Foreman grills. Maybe a growth industry in fact. "Foreman's human grillers. A technology for public health!" I mean the public doing the eating, not the public being eaten.
Posted by: Benjamin Cohen | October 27, 2007 11:32 AM
There is no clear evidence that Crohne's is in any way infectious. There *is* some evidence that an infection is correlated to the illness: whether that is because it causes the illness, makes one more susceptible to the illness, or becomes a common infection *because* the illness makes you susceptible, has not been cleared up empirically.
Moreover, the infectious bacteria to which you refer is found in approximately 10% of the milk you buy in stores. As such, one may consider a Crohne's patient safe eating.
--
(Yes, Crohne's and Ulcerative Colitis are personal research favorites of mine.)
Posted by: James Stein | October 27, 2007 6:42 PM
Benjamin:
A list like this is actually why it would not be a good idea to eat people - otherwise, it would be a perfectly sensible idea (distasteful maybe...). A list like this is why we don't eat cows or pigs that just drop dead on their own. Absurdity is funny, but this is the kind of joke that should at least be logically consistent. If I was going to make up a list of reasons why it's not a good idea to beat yourself in the head with an electrified hammer while standing in a pool of piranhas, and I wound up with this:
1. Blue puppies
2. Germany
3. Miniskirts would go out of style
- that would not be funny. It would just be absurdly stupid. And irritating.
Posted by: Brian | October 27, 2007 10:22 PM
I hear you, Brian, I hear you what you're saying and I totally agree. It's like, I was thinking of Woody Allen's line about nature, that he is "at two with nature," and I thought, now isn't that typically absurd? No wonder his movies aren't as good as they used to be. We have untold amounts of ecological data to prove that humans are as much members of nature as any other thing, yet here he goes with logically inconsistent claims. I wish humor could be objective, just like science. That's what's wrong with it, I guess.
Posted by: Benjamin Cohen | October 28, 2007 1:27 PM
I actually found the responses much more humorous than the original post. and informative, too. When the apocalypse comes I want to be prepared, not misinformed. It would be a shame to pass up a perfectly edible Leukemia patient simply because some humorist didn't do his research.
Posted by: Karen | October 29, 2007 9:11 AM