It sounds like scientists studying the family that suffered a bunch of deaths due to H5N1 caught if
from another member of their family.
The implication is they maybe have been infected by a slightly human-contagious straing.
Interestingly, only those related by blood - not marriage - were infected/killed by the virus. It became a amily curse, in effect.
H5N1 virus mutated slightly in Indonesian family cluster: WHO investigation:
A painstaking international investigation into the largest human cluster of H5N1 avian flu cases to date revealed the virus mutated as it began to spread from person to person in a family in Indonesia, the World Health Organization reported in a meeting that concluded Friday in Jakarta.
There are some very good reasons that humans and most other mammals eschew cannibalism.
The one exception that comes to mind, rodent mothers who eat their own newborns when under stress - is not going to increase chance of prion infection.
Unlike humans who eat other humans - a very unpopular practice - and a recent practice of feeding cows a mixture of up to 10 percen cow blood with their traditional plant-based foods... the females are not being introduced to a novel self-replicating molecule stream in the rodent mother case.
A recent report pointed out incidents of polar bears resorting to cannibalism as their supply of food dwindles. That might have long-term impact on polar bears if the incidents increase at the same time the population size decreases. Recursive probability series function.
Bloomberg.com: U.K.:
A study of an epidemic caused by cannibalism indicates the human form of mad-cow disease may incubate for more than 50 years before developing into the fatal illness, researchers said in a medical journal.
The findings suggest the eventual size of a variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease epidemic may be much bigger than previously thought, U.K. researchers including John Collinge of the University College London wrote in this week's The Lancet.
Many taboos have a very sound basis in scientific fact.
Apparently, ants eat their dead quite a lot. Male fish are also known to eat small fry, even of their own species.
Prion diseases, once they become present in these species, should theoretically become kind of rampant.
In the case of ants and other social insects that create colonies, most of the members of the colony do not participate in breeding at all. So, they are probably less affected. That is, unless they feed the dead to their queens.
It would be interesting to see if they have such a practice under normal or certain special conditions. My guess would be that they probably do not, at least not under normal conditions.
A global climate study commissioned by the US Congress just concluded that the mean temperature is now at its highest point in the past 400 years. Further, it might be at its hottest point in the past 1,000 years, the study said.
Chron.com | Congress told Earth's climate on hot streak: "'Let me add that we recognize the globe is warming,' [Larry] Neal said. 'And we also recognize that the hockey-stick graph asserts a cause that seems plausible and which many have found convincing."
Objections to scientific claims that global warming seem to have been collapsing in the past year.
The one set of data that indicated that temperatures were
not rising over the past couple decades came from a satellite that had a technical flaw in its design.
With that discrepency removed, the picture of climate change became seriously tilted in favor of the global warming view.
There does not seem to be much support for the idea that global cooling is going on now.
If mankind were to intentionally set out to raise the temperature of the planet, the things we would probably do would be:
- Burn a lot of stuff as fuel, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
- Destroy vast tracts of vegetation, especially trees, eliminating them as carbon-dioxide
carbon scrubbers
and, as a bonus, releasing their trapped carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. - Increase the amount of animal life in the biomass of the Earth by large scale animal husbandry/farming (preferably cows, which produce lots of methane, another greenhouse gas).
- Built vast urban structures out of concrete/stone/iron criss-crossed with black asphalt roadways to collect and trap the Sun's heat that reaches the Earth.
- Rapidly increase the industrialization of the most populous countries on earth (India [1 billion people] and China [2 billion people]) so fuel consumption not only continues to rise - but sky rockets over just the course of a couple decades, and never abates. Societies stop using energy over their dead bodies once they start.
On the bright side, at least we are thorough.
Apparently, some polar bears have decided that their fellow polar bears are the
other white meat
now.
Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.ADVERTISEMENTThe study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.
Polar bears may be turning to cannibalism - Yahoo! News
Polar bears do tend to kill other polar bears to establish dominance, get mates, and trim population size - the article says. Like humans, they do not chow down on their victims afterwards. However, this appears to be changing.
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