Kuru Disease

What is Kuru? In the early twentieth century health scientist shifted their attention to a new disease called Kuru. Kuru was a disease spreading within the Fore people of Papa New Guinea. Kuru is also known as the laughing sickness, or the trembling sickness because the disease caused its victims to tremor, laugh uncontrollably, loose their balance and lose control of their motor movements. Victims eventually lose the ability to talk, chew and swallow and Kuru inevitably leads to death. The tribes being affected by Kuru were very spiritual and believed this awful disease that was taking over their population was caused by sorcerers. However, scientist from all over the world were determined to track down the cause of this unknown disease.
Researches tried their best to communicate with the people within the eastern highlands of Papa New Guinea to track down family lines for clues of heredity. Results of this disease being heredity came up negative, but anthropologists Robert Glasse and Shirley Lindenbaum were able to date the onset of the disease to the 1920’s. (Robert Glasse ). Samples of soil, water, plant and food were collected to determine if the disease was caused by an environmental factor. No results came up positive for this either. Early Kuru researchers, Glasse and Lindenbaum proposed the hypothesis that the occurrence of kuru was directly related to cannibalism. The Fore people practiced mortuary cannibalism of their relatives to “free the spirits of the dead.” According to Shirley Lindebaum, the author of Kuru Sorcery Disease and Danger in the New Guinea, “When a body was considered for human consumption, none of it was discarded except the bitter gall bladder. In the deceased’s old sugarcane garden, maternal kin dismembered the corpse with a bamboo knife and stone axe. They first removed hands and feet, then cut open the arms and legs to strip the muscles. Opening the chest and belly, they avoided rupturing the gall bladder, whose bitter content would ruin the meat. After severing the head, they fractured the skull to remove the brain. Meat, viscera, and brain were all eaten. Marrow was sucked from cracked bones, and sometimes the pulverized bones themselves were cooked and
Dr. Gajdusek from the United States National Institutes of Health began a study of Kuru in Papa New Guinea in 1957. Gadjusek examined more than 200 patients with Kuru. 50 of the patients were children and the rest were woman. Gadjusek kept a very detailed journal of his observations and findings of how Kuru effected each patient. Gadjusek removed pieces of brain from dead victims and then viewed them under microscopes. He then declared that Kuru was an infectious disease of the brain and nervous system. Gadjusek performed many studies to investigate the hypothesis that cannibalism was the cause of Kuru. He performed numerous studies on animals including snakes, pigs and even bears. Many of the studies involved injecting specimens of kuru victims into the blood of these animals and then observing them for many months. However, he could not prove that Kuru was infectious or transmissible. In 1962 Gadjusek and Alepers began working together to try and determine the cause of this new brain disease. William Hadlow, a veterinarian neuropathologist, had been working on a disease called Scrapie when he learned about Gajdusek’s findings of Kuru. Hadlow then informed Gadjusek of his idea that Scrapie and Kuru seemed extremely similar to each other. Both Scrapie and Kuru resembled a spongiform defect on the brain tissue. Scrapie is a transmissible