(This one’s been simmering on my mind for awhile. What the hell…)
Okay, strictly speaking, the question doesn’t just apply to humans, as HIV can infect Chimps (and, IIRC, a few other critters) as well as humans. But what fun is that to put in the thread title?
So, the question stands…can you contract HIV through eating the flesh of something/one infected with the virus? Would it matter how long the meal had been dead, or how well it was cooked?
As I recall, the risk of AIDS from oral sex is small but not apparently zero, so it should be possible. Cooking it well would probably make it safe; HIV isn’t all that durable.
I used to teach HIV-education classes with a friend, and we once had a guy ask “Can I get HIV if I drink a cup of somebody else’s blood?”
I think the answer, to that question and yours is, technically, yes. To contract HIV you need two things, a Fluid and a Doorway. HIV is carried in four body fluids - blood, semen, vaginal fluid and breast milk. A doorway is something like a cut or a tear in the skin, or in the much more delicate mucus membranes, found inside the vagina, inside the anus, and, if I recall, inside your mouth. If one of those fluids encounters one of those doorways, the virus can get into your system, and then you are in trouble.
Depending on what part of the body you are eating, you will probably definitely be
consuming some blood, and if there are any cuts or abrasions anywhere in your digestive tract, from your mouth to your butt, the virus can get in.
Although I wonder, would it just be from your mouth to your stomach? Would stomach acid kill the virus?
And I know that HIV is not a particularly hearty virus and cannot survive for very long outside one of its four fluids, but I would think that so long as it is inside the body, it would still be ok. So eating fresh raw people would probably be as bad as eating rotting, fermented people.
Of course, I have no cites, and what I posted is all recollection and educated conjecture, so somebody please feel free to contradict me with more accurate information. Mostly I just wanted to relate my cup-of-blood-drinking anecdote.
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yams!!
Sigh…cook the shit at 160 degress. How fuckin hard is that to fuckin understand?
It’s quite easy to understand that you belief that’ll do it, Malvert - the question is whether or not that’s actually correct. I could be mistaken, but I believe different micro-organisms and viruses (virii?) have different heat tolerances. Some bugs might take more heat than others to kill.
So, if you believe HIV is inactivated at 160 degrees Fahrenheit - why do you believe this? Do you have evidence? Like a cite?
I remember reading speculation that humans eating monkey meat is what allowed HIV (or SIV, as the case may be) to jump species. Is this still the thinking on the origin of HIV? (Can’t find a decent cite.) If so, there’s your answer. If a human could get it from eating a SIV/HIV+ monkey, I see no reason that eating a HIV+ human would be any safer.
Mr. Excellent, [del]I can’t find a cite, now[/del] - but I suspect that Malvert has the right of it - protiens are very temperature sensitive, and ISTR that HIV is more fragile a bug than something like the cold virus - suscpetible to pH, temperature, and other environmental factors.
Here’s a cite that mentions the virus is “sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and the presence of oxygen,” but I can’t find hard numbers.
It’s not a guarantee that cooking to 160 degrees will sterilize HIV, but I think, given the general tendencies of proteins to degrade in high temperature environments, combined with a note that this specific virus is sensitve to temperature changes, I’d have to be convinced it could survive cooking to 160 F.
Never.
In Latin, ‘virus’ is a mass noun and so has no plural form. (It means ‘slime’.) In English, we form plurals by adding ‘s’ or ‘es’, so from ‘virus’ we make ‘viruses’.
There are some groups of people living in West Africa who have been found to have SIV in their bloodstream, but to no ill effect. HIV might have come from eating monkeys, but then the question then becomes - ok, but people have been chowing down on monkeys for hundreds of thousands of years, why was it only in 1960/70/80 that the previously innocuous strain of SIV mutated into HIV?
According to one hypothesis, it happened when they were doing one of the huge polio vaccine campaigns, and vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people with only tens of hundreds (or less) of needles. One person had one of those harmless strains of SIV in his system, and when he got the vaccine, it got sucked up in the syringe, and then passed on to the next person in line, and the next person, and the next person, etc. Each time the virus entered a new person, it would have a new environment in which certain mutations could thrive, then those new mutations would be passed on to the next person in line. I dont know exactly how this process works on the DNA/RNA level, but it is called passaging, and they use it on purpose in labs when they are working with viruses/bacteria. So the theory is that by passaging the virus through so many people, they kind of accidentally sped up the evolution of the virus, and it mutated from SIV into HIV. Presto chango, iatrogenic pandemic.
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yams!!
Party at Ranchoth’s place!!!