Book Report - Deadly Feasts
Reading Summaries
Section 1 - Among the Cannibals
Chapter 1 - I Eat You
As you can most likely tell by the title, and the fact that this is the beginning of the book, this chapter is an exposition. This explains what exactly the book is about, as the title is somewhat vague. The title 'I Eat You', gives away the fact that this has something to do with cannibalism, which it does. This chapter gives a setting, South Asia, and a subject (Cannibalism and it's infection consequences) for the rest of the book.
Chapter 2 - Kuru
This chapter is like a more in depth exposition than the first chapter. It gives an insight to what disease we're talking about, and where exactly it is. The chapter is focused around the disease 'Kuru', which is a very deadly neurological disease (meaning it decays the brain), in Indonesia. As you may of guessed, this degenerate disease enters the body heretic-ally or by the eating of a human who has died of Kuru. The people that this book focuses on, as revealed in this chapter, are the Fore, and other natives of Indonesia. These Fore and other natives have a very sick and dangerous tradition of eating the dead, as they believe it gives the souls a resting place in the stomach of the living.
Chapter 3 - Dr. Creutzfeldt and Dr. Jakob
This chapter is about two doctors, Creutzfeldt and Jakob, who together put together findings of a new virus: CJD. This is also fatal neurological virus that kills 100% of it's infected, and is only slightly more common than rabies. This disease is known to spread throughout the world. CJD, or more commonly known by its disease cousin, Mad Cow Disease, is a very cruel virus. It slowly eats holes in the brain causing very peculiar uncontrollable actions such as twitching eyes, flailing arms, and even random screaming or laughing. This chapter tells the story of the connection made between Creutzfeldt, Jakob, Gajdusek, and Zigas (discoverer and researched of Kuru (Zigas and Gajdusek)).
Chapter 4 - Across the Species Barrier
This chapter is the connections Gajdusek makes between species. Gajdusek travels around the world looking at different disease cases, including Malaria in Libya, and blood virus's in the uncivilized lands of New Guinea. After returning to the U.S. to further his research on the disease of Kuru, Gajdusek starts to draw out the connections between species, most importantly primates. This is happening in 1960, and Gajdusek knows little of "Transmissible spongiform encephalitides" right now, and this is the research that open the door to what we now know as Mad Cow Disease.
Chapter 5 - The Life and Death of Georgette
The chapter starts off by re-introducing the Kuru disease. They further explain the research they will be doing on the disease. As Kuru is a neurological disease, it is only found in specific species as different species have different brains. The closest primate of human's are chimpanzee's, and as you can guess, they do neurotic research on these animals. They study Parkinson's, Kuru, ALS, and other diseases/virus's on a chimpanzees. The chapter starts by telling how the doctor hated testing on chimpanzees, as he viewed them as 'too human'. The chimpanzee they test Kuru on is named George, but after testing they realize that they have mistaken her gender. George becomes Georgette! Unfortunately a researcher who had Tuberculosis came to the testing facility and infected all of the animals, and Gajdusek had to bleed all of the animals out and preserve their brains.
Chapter 6 - The Cannibal Connection
This was an extremely interesting chapter. Most of the chapter was the doctor's talking about the research they had done, however one small bit was very interesting to me. A scientist had trained planaria-small flatworms that live water and moist soil-to find their way out of a simple maze. The scientist then killed the planaria, and fed the remains to another test group of planaria. The test group was able to remember their way through the maze! I found this to be an extremely interesting, and disturbing chapter for one reason. If knowledge is commutative by digestion, is the understanding of the universe and everything within it possible by cannibalism?
Section 2 - The Strangest Thing in All (of) Biology
Chapter 7 - The Disease That Wouldn't Die
This chapter explains very deep neurological research, most of which I had a hard time understanding. They begin by studying the reproductive process of live birthing mammals, and end up studying the cells that a female's egg has. These cells act as as a storage of information for the organism's entire life. Through the research done at Gajdusek's laboratory, he was looked at as a clinical study. After the research done on cells and Kuru, Gajdusek was renowned as one of the master TSE scientist's of the time. If a neurological disease ever became fatal, people turned to Gajdusek.
Chapter 8 - High Tech Neocanniblism
This is also an interesting chapter! In this chapter we meet a new ophthalmologist, Dr. DeVoe, who performs a surgery on a woman with a faulty cornea. The facility receives a cornea harvested from a man with CJD, who miraculously had the same optic nerves and blood type has the woman. The doctor's did not know that the optic nerve of the man had been infected with CJD when harvested though, and later gave the woman CJD. She died 18 months after the operation. The interesting part is how a neurological disease can infect the parts of an eye without actually manifesting the cornea or optic nerve itself!
Chapter 9 - Infecting Children
This chapter starts of with Gajdusek winning the Nobel Prize in medicine, but not actually knowing that he had won it as he was busy researching Kuru and CJD. During his research, Gajdusek had learned that the growth hormones that doctor's extracted to inject into children can actually concentrate CJD agents. Growth hormones are used to counteract dwarfinism, and as thousand's of children had to be treated for this world wide, CJD could have turned into something MUCH larger if those growth hormones had been infected.
Chapter 10 - A Candidate for a Modern Wonder
Chapter 10 is like a progression down the body. In chapter 9 we discussed the effects Kuru can have on the eye and optical degeneration it has, and it the previous chapter we discussed the effects that Kuru has directly on the cranium. In this chapter, Dr. Gajdusek explores the similar effect that Kuru has on the spinal cord, and the possible reasoning for the uncontrollable movements that Kuru causes, both physically and mentally. Kuru shows similar signs as multiple sclerosis, and other crippling diseases that eventually lead to incapacitation and immobilization. Kuru is beginning to look like the combination of all crippling and degenerate diseases.
Section 3 - God in the Guide of a Virus
Chapter 11 - Meat Bites Back
This chapter is similar to chapter 5, where we cross species. This time British farmers notice many similar symptoms in their cattle, possibly a variant of Mad Cow Disease. It was Dr. Whitaker who addressed this case first, who was a British Veterinarian. The first case of 'MCD' in Britain occurred on April 25th, 1985, when Whitaker received a call from one his local dairy farmer clients. The cow was diagnosed with 'ovarian cysts', which cause much of the aggressive behavior and nymphomania described in the cases. (Yes this may sound contradicting to itself, if you understand what those words mean, but you must remember this a neurological disease) Although the bovine specimen appeared to have been treated successfully, but it had died a year later due to similar symptoms of Kuru. The diagnoses was not BSE, but rather something to do with the diet of the cattle. As cows are fed much more often if they produce milk, there were many more cases in these cattle than there were in cattle raised for slaughter. These cattle produce 30-40 pounds of milk a day, or 1,250 gallons of milk per lactation. To produce these extreme amounts of milk, they must be kept on a good diet. As cows are fed many pounds of grass as it is much more efficient to do so, the farmer's must be careful when giving them the required nutrients. This means that when cows do have to take the required amount of protein, it comes in BIG amounts at one time. This is because the base diet of grass is much cheaper and easier, as opposed to feeding them expensive foods with more nutrients and minerals. The several hundred BSE-like cases through England and Wales are presumed to have been caused by an issue with the protein supplements.
Chapter 12 - Ice-Nine
This chapter discusses Gajdusek in his later years. Gajdusek had not gotten a proper diet throughout his years, and by the end of his career he was nearing 300 pounds, gray hair, and poor health. This is not surprising considering his time spent around deadly diseases and savage natives. Gajdusek had started his carrer at a wiry 140 pounds, with black hair. Gajdusek was never mistaken for his powerful intelligence, however.
Aside from describing Gajdusek, this chapter goes on to explain several other occurences involving bovine, around the world. When Gajdusek flew to London, he had gone to McDonalds, and was startled to see a notice in the window reading the following:
We are no longer using British meat
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
CJD had cost the British meat industry 37,500,000 million dollars a year. This was a great gain for the Dutch, however. This next bit of information is extremely disgusting, and if you're a pig lover, I advise you to not read any more of chapter 12.
A later discovery in April of 1985, in the city of Zürich, Switzerland, the swine industry was severely harmed. The Swiss government had confirmed that two swine facilities had been feeding their pigs placentas-presumably from abortions. Placentas is the lining an unborn baby is surrounded in, which is removed during abortions. This being fed to millions of pigs, could of caused a plague like epidemic if any of the mothers were infected by Kuru or CJD, or any of the other hereditary neurological diseases.
Chapter 13 - It's Kuru and Nothing but Kuru
This chapter is outro for the book, and gives many statistic's and graphs. One I found quite interesting was the chances of getting sporadic CJD: 1 in 1,000,000. This is a chance more likely than winning the lotto, approximately 100 times more likely; so if you've won the lotto you might want to watch what you eat!
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