When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged

Kuru is a very rare disease, caused by an infectious protein found in contaminated human brain tissue. It is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. This practice stopped in 1960, but cases of Kuru were reported for many years afterward because the disease has a long incubation period. Kuru is caused by the same type of protein-damaging prion as mad cow disease.

Kuru is a rare, incurable, and fatal neurodegenerative disorder that was formerly common among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Kuru is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) caused by the transmission of abnormally folded proteins (prions), which leads to symptoms such as tremors and loss of coordination from neurodegeneration.

The term kuru derives from the Fore word kuria or guria ("to shake"), due to the body tremors that are a classic symptom of the disease. Kúru itself means "trembling".

It is also known as the "laughing sickness" due to the pathologic bursts of laughter which are a symptom of the disease. It is now widely accepted that kuru was transmitted among members of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea via funerary cannibalism. Deceased family members were traditionally cooked and eaten, which was thought to help free the spirit of the dead. The disease was more prevalent among women and children because adult men did not participate in the cannibalistic funeral ritual, but the long incubation period meant adult men were also affected.

Though prion differences across different types of TSE are poorly understood, the epidemic likely started when a villager developed sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and died, sometime around the year 1900. When villagers ate the brain, they contracted the disease and then spread it to other villagers who ate their infected brains.

While the Fore people stopped consuming human meat in the early 1960s, when it was first speculated to be transmitted via endocannibalism, the disease lingered due to kuru's long incubation period of anywhere from 10 to over 50 years.

The epidemic finally declined sharply after half a century, from 200 deaths per year in 1957 to no deaths from at least 2010 onwards, with sources disagreeing on whether the last known kuru victim died in 2005 or 2009.

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