alt Hacker NewsYes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
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Its only safer because of dilution - insects are less likely to have proteins that a prion can induce to misfolding.
But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.
While cannibalism is related to transmission in some cases I don't understand it to have anything to do with prion formation in and of itself. See scrapie for example. While highly contagious the underlying cause of scrapie is typically (afaiu) genetic and transmissible through the environment over fairly long periods of time.
Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.
Yeah and to be honest the research on it is still at the start. Maybe with the advances in protein folding computational research we'll be able to understand this better
Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions
Let's not forget human > human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)