The same thing was noted in Kentucky back in the '90s. A whole bunch of people acquired a "mad squirrel disease". Back then they were reporting it as a variant of mad cow. Like Creutzfeldt-Jakob, it's a prion disease. All of the affected people were squirrel brain-eaters. All of them died.
Same thing can happen from eating all sorts of brain, including human brains (Kuru disease).
Moral of the story: don't eat brains!
Probably good advice.
I can almost guarantee that the country people back in the day who ate squirrel brains also ate pork brains from the hogs they raised. Whether or not it harmed them is anyone's guess.
