I've done experiments (with items from the catbox, not my own) with vermi-composting night soil. A healthy colony of E. foetidia with vanish a turd in less than an hour or so.
Hmm I'm not quite sure this would actually neutralize parasites however. In composting, the actions of the microbes themselves allow the pile to reach temperatures high enough to burn your hand. These temperatures can actually be sustained for quite a while too. Even the very microbes that cause temperatures to reach that high themselves die and the only lifeforms left are some specialist thermophilic species.
Vermicompost setups never reach those temperatures so I don't see how it could possibly be safe to vermicompost human feces in them...
It's a good point. The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease, so there's that...
A quick search turned up this...
> As for pathogens, while there has been considerable research demonstrating the effectiveness of vermicomposting as a means of destroying pathogens, I still recommend taking a cautious approach with any material removed from the system. You may want to further process it via hot composting before using it – and you may want to avoid using it as fertilizer for food crops (even with additional measures being taken).
> The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease
As much as HN loves obsessing over prions they're still an extremely rare phenomenon and there's few real solutions to resolving them regardless of how you deal with organic matter. Your poop is also not the only way it spreads. Saliva, urine, blood, etc all spread it. Ultimately a prion is just a protein malformed in a very specific configuration. If anything, exposing organic matter to high heat might actually reduce the risk of prions spreading than collecting all sewage together and washing it many miles away in underground tunnels
But yes, there are definitely other pathogens worth thinking about that can be spread from human organic products and I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
That being said, vermicomposting is a wonderful way to quickly turn food waste and other less dangerous organic waste products into usable soil
The prion thing was a joke. (Not prion disease, that's objectively terrifying.)
> I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
Oh yeah. If I were to use this system for human poop I'd probably go a step further and use the resulting compost only on plants that were themselves destined to be (hot) composted.
FYI, prions aren't damaged by a mere 200F compost pile. It's a problem in hospitals too, where their ordinary autoclave temperatures only kill bacterial spores and other less hardy things.
I'm not sure but I think he's putting humanure directly on crops that he then eats. It's a pretty tight cycle, and it seems to me (with ZERO expertise) that if human prions are a thing that's a good way to find them.
