Kuru

Kuru is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that emerged among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in the mid-20th century. The disease causes progressive dementia, loss of motor control, ataxia, and psychiatric symptoms, typically resulting in death within 6 to 24 months of symptom onset. The epidemic peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, affecting predominantly women and children. Cases declined sharply after the 1960s as the cultural practices associated with transmission were abandoned.

Transmission and Discovery

Kuru was transmitted through the consumption of infected brain tissue during mortuary cannibalistic practices, specifically among women and children who prepared and consumed the bodies of deceased relatives as part of funeral rites. The disease could incubate for years or even decades before symptoms appeared. Medical researchers, including Carleton Gajdusek, determined the infectious agent was transmissible and established the connection between the disease and these practices in the 1960s. Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for his work on kuru.

Prion Disease Classification

Kuru belongs to a class of diseases caused by prions—misfolded proteins that can induce normal proteins to adopt the same aberrant shape. This discovery was pivotal in establishing the protein-only hypothesis of infectious disease, challenging the conventional understanding that all infections required nucleic acids. Kuru, along with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and scrapie, demonstrated that prion diseases could be transmitted between individuals and species, fundamentally changing understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.