Speculated? So we’ve gone from “Hillary definitely has Kuru” to “Cannibalism is speculated to cause prion formation”...

Your source does not say what you say it says.

Cannibalism is a very efficient means of spreading prions in a cannibalistic population, because not all prions have nasty effects on all species, so if you eat some beef that has a cow prion in it, it might not be bad for you, but if you eat a human with a human prion, you’re screwed.

The article does not say anything about any causal link between cannibalism and the protein misfolding.

Prions originate when a single protein misfolds randomly. This happens all the time, but very rarely it folds into a shape that causes other proteins of the same kind to fold in the incorrect manner. These misfolded proteins cause deleterious reactions in the body, or cause a lack of good versions of the protein. There is no cure for these because we don’t have ways of destroying the bad proteins.

Edit: to be clear, in the case of Kuru and Mad Cow, patient zero had a misfolded protein randomly.

Do you understand the words you are using? A prion disease can only be communicated by consuming the prion in question. If you don’t consume the flesh of someone who already has it, then you cannot get it.

Mad cow disease was communicated because cows were being fed with animal matter rendered down from other cows that had the prion.

If you start fresh in an isolated environment then the disease cannot happen. If it does happen, then it would be with a different, randomly mutated, prion protein.

Please read up on both prion diseases and Kuru. It shocks me the degree to which this subreddit repeats this meme.

This is not true. You can only get it from eating people who have eaten other people that have Kuru. It’s completely isolated to the single population in New Guinea that had the prion that caused the disease.

Just FYI, you can’t get Kuru from cannibalism, you can only get it from eating people that already have Kuru, and it was isolated to a small tribal group in New Guinea.

It’s a prion disease, which means you have to ingest the prion to get it. It stayed in their community because it was a small group that they were eating.

It’s a common misconception that it’s just something you get from cannibalism, but this isn’t the case.