The so-called "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles," would eventually misfold enough proteins to kill pockets of nerve cells in the brain, leaving the cerebellum riddled with holes, like a sponge. It was an entirely new infectious agent, one that had no genetic material, could survive being boiled, and wasn't even alive.Īs another group would find years later, it was just a twisted protein, capable of performing the microscopic equivalent of a Jedi mind trick, compelling normal proteins on the surface of nerve cells in the brain to contort just like them. The group, which won a Nobel Prize for the findings, dubbed it a "slow virus."īut it wasn't a virus - or a bacterium, fungus, or parasite. National Institutes of Health injected infected human brain into chimpanzees, and watched symptoms of kuru develop in the animals months later. The case was closed after a group at the U.S. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."įinally, after urging from researchers like Lindenbaum, biologists came around to the idea that the strange disease stemmed from eating dead people. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain age and went off to live with the men. "So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body - taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.īut women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. It was primarily adult women who did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. ![]() Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. ![]() It was an act of love and grief.Īs one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects." In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. Specifically, it had to do with eating dead bodies at funerals. Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on, and she turned out to be right. She also knew that it had started in villages in the north around the turn of the century, and then moved south over the decades. They'd also lose control over their emotions, which is why people called it the "laughing death." Within a year, they couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves or control their bodily functions.īut Lindenbaum, who continues to write about the epidemic, knew it couldn't be genetic, because it affected women and children in the same social groups, but not in the same genetic groups. ![]() First, they'd have trouble walking, a sign that they were about to lose control over their limbs. Once symptoms set in, it was a swift demise. They called the disease kuru, which means "shivering" or "trembling." Among a tribe of about 11,000 people called the Fore, up to 200 people a year had been dying of an inexplicable illness. When researchers made their way to those villages in the 1950s, they found something disturbing. Most of the world didn't know anyone lived in the highlands of Papua New Guinea until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors surveying the area realized there were about a million people there. In 1962, a local leader in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea asks Fore men to stop the sorcery that he believes is killing women and children.
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