Book of Eli. Cannibal shakes

[Danny McG]

In the film 'The book of Eli' it is mentioned a few (more than a couple but less than several) times about the signs of a cannibal.
It is alleged you can spot them 'cos their hands tremble, the main character had to show his steady hand at one point to prove he wasn't.
Is this true?
Do cannibals have shaky hands?
Where would a scriptwriter get this information?

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Something to do with prion diseases, I would assume?

 

[Danny McG]

Ahh, something to google now. Cheers

Edit: Kuru seems to be the answer!

 

[Toby Frost]

Interesting - I wondered if this was some kind of Old Testament curse or the like. I got the feeling that there was more to this than we saw, and that it had been cut from the film.

 

[Nick B]

Its a trope used in a couple of films where canibalism arose, there was a horror I watched where it happened, book of eli and I think something similar in The Road.

Any form of prion disease is fatal fairly quickly, and would (as in kuru) have been localised due to something in the meat they were eating.

I don't think there is any science behind the idea. Could be wrong though. Plenty of people have resorted to cannibalism, and there are plenty of tribes that have/still do.

 

[Danny McG]

Article online I read today
What happens to your body when you become a cannibal - it's unsurprisingly grim

 

[Nick B]

But if you look closer than newspaper articles, you will find kuru is most likely from eating the brains of infected people. Much the same as 'offal' and 'animal derivative' mean brain may be present (and used to be eaten quite happily anyway.) which spread the cow version of encephalitis.

So yes, kuru (prions desease) can be spread through cannibalism, most likely through eating brain. In Papua New Guinnea, the tribe that are most often cited when this comes up fed children brain matter. They ate their own dead, so it passed onwards.

It may have taken some 20 years to build to the point the tribe suffered the major outbreak though. And clearly, they had been practicing cannibalism for a long time before this. The symptoms only take a few months before death, so it must have taken hold of a generation quite fast.

I still hold, it is a trope and if you research it, you will repeatedly come back to the same case in Papua N G. but cannibalism was much more widespread than that.