44 In a 1954 study, Czech researchers claimed that placenta consumption increased lactation in postpartum women having lactational difficulty (compared to a control group fed beef). According to Mark Kristal though, “This study does not conform to modern-day ideas about scientific methods or statistical analyses.” He noted that “the experiment was methodologically flawed” and that the hormones responsible for increased lactation would have been denatured in the preparation they described.
17: Cannibalism in the Pacific Islands
Nothing it seems to me is more difficult than to explain to a cannibal why he should give up human flesh. He immediately asks, “Why mustn’t I eat it?” And I have never yet been able to find an answer to that question beyond the somewhat unsatisfactory one, “Because you mustn’t.” However, though logically unconvincing, this reply, when backed by the presence of the police and by vague threats about the Government, is generally effective in a much shorter time than one could reasonably anticipate.
— J. H. P. Murray, Lt. Governor/Chief Judicial Officer, British New Guinea, 1912
In the spring of 1985, veterinarians working in the English counties of Sussex and Kent were puzzled when dairy farmers reported that a few of their cows were exhibiting some peculiar symptoms. The normally docile creatures were acting skittish and aggressive. They also exhibited abnormal posture, difficulty standing up and walking, and a general lack of coordination. Most of the cows were put down and sent on to rendering plants—facilities that process dead, often diseased animals into products like grease, tallow, and bone meal. It wasn’t until the following year that England’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food launched an investigation.
According to research biochemist Colm Kelleher, microscope slides were prepared from the brains of stricken cows and they showed the tissue to be riddled with holes, reminiscent of Swiss cheese. In what would become the first of many unfortunate decisions, the veterinary pathologists who examined the slides blamed the holes on faulty slide preparation. But by November of the following year, researchers knew that the abnormal spaces had once been filled with neurons that had shrunken and died. They also thought that amyloid plaques, the sticky concentrations of a normally non-sticky brain protein, might be a contributing factor to the neuron deaths. The holes and plaques were characteristic of a number of neurological diseases, with sheep scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) being the best known of these somewhat mysterious maladies. These and other diseases of their ilk were classified as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) because of the spongy appearance of infected brain tissue.45 The British researchers soon named their new disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The press, of course, would need something a bit splashier. They settled on “Mad Cow Disease.”
By 1987, there were over 400 confirmed cases of BSE, which had spread to cattle herds across England, and while scientists looked for puzzle pieces, nervous government officials (who preferred the term “bovine scrapie”) repeatedly reassured the public that it was safe to eat English beef. And why not, they rationalized, hadn’t scrapie been killing sheep for centuries with no harm to the humans who consumed them? Why then should a bovine version of the disease be any different?
Other researchers, though, were not so sure, and a few of them began comparing BSE to a disease that had killed humans—thousands of them. To these professionals, this particular affliction was still known by its indigenous name, kuru (the trembling disease). Like their UK counterparts, the American media corps had previously scrambled to coin their own inappropriate names for kuru. They settled on “the laughing death” and alternately, “laughing sickness,” at a time when being called “politically correct” meant you had voted for the guy who won.