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, 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, before declining as the cultural practices associated with its transmission ceased.

Discovery and Cause

Kuru was investigated in the 1960s by researcher Carleton Gajdusek, who traced the disease’s transmission to the practice of mortuary cannibalism among the Fore, specifically the consumption of deceased relatives’ brains during funeral rites. Gajdusek’s epidemiological work demonstrated that kuru was transmissible and incubated over years or decades before symptoms appeared. His research provided early evidence for the existence of infectious agents composed entirely of protein—later termed prions—without conventional nucleic acids, fundamentally challenging existing understanding of infectious disease and contributing to the modern protein-only hypothesis of disease transmission.

Legacy

The study of kuru established the concept of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), a class of diseases affecting both humans and animals. Kuru’s investigation won Gajdusek the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976. The disease has since become extinct in the Fore population following the cessation of mortuary cannibalism, though the research continues to inform understanding of prion diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle.