Vwegba Blogging World

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 sympt