Wa11y posted:

Nancy is talking about the disease Kuru, at least that's what it's called in humans. It's caused by eating mis formed proteins. Because they're proteins and not a virus or bacteria, there's really no anti-bacterial or anti-viral treatment for it, and you can't inoculate against it. Brain and spinal matter are where these prions occur most often, but can be found in other meat, and are most easily transmitted by eating meat/brain matter of your own spices. Sometimes other species can be affected by them, but that's much less common. However, during the mad cow scares, there were enough probably infected cows that it significantly increased the risk. If you're NOT grinding up your slaughterhouse leavings and feeding them to your other cows, you may still see it occasionally in your stock, but it will have such a low incidence rate that it will almost never transfer to humans.

The only way to make infected meat safe to eat is to cook it long and hot enough to denature the protein, which pretty much destroys all nutritional value and taste (see also: burned to ash).