A weird sickness was growing among the Fore tribe of Papua Modern Guinea. People started to lose their coordination. They walked an unsteady gait. They had tremors. They suffered severe headaches and joint pain. They lost their appetite and would waste absent to nothing. They had severe mood swings, sometimes depressed or insane, and a brief time later would have a bout of eerie laughter. It was this spooky and disturbing laughter, even amid deteriorating physical conditions that prompted the Fore people to call this weird modern malady, Kuru, which in English roughly translated as The Laughing Sickness. Maximum tribes people thought the sufferers were mentally ill. To these uneducated people that rarely had contact with the external world, that meant one thing- their friends and loved ones were being cursed.
As more and more member of the Fore tribe died, it came to the attention of prominent investigators. This was 1957 and in the next five years approximately 1000 people died from Kuru. World wide it was even a blip in the statistics but in Papua Modern Guinea it was a full blown epidemic. After much research it was learned those afflicted were suffering from a sickness we would maximum closely associate with Insane Cow Sickness, or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, nowadays. But Insane Cow is transmitted from eating infected brain and spinal tissue. What agent caused Kuru in the Fore victims? The answer was human brain tissue, or more specifically, the ingesting of human brain tissue. The Fore tribe were cannibals.
They weren’t, for the maximum part, what we have come to reckon of as cannibals in Western culture. They didn’t contract the sickness from so-called headhunting. They became afflicted with Kuru from their weird funeral customs.
Once a Fore person died, they were dismembered by the deceased person’s maternal family. Women would slice off hands and feet, strip muscle from the bone and remove the brain and other internal organs. According to Shirley Lindenbaum, one of the earliest Kuru researchers, the flesh of the victims of this weird sickness was highly prized as food since the meat had stout layers resembling pork.
Among the Fore, rates of Kuru were not evenly distributed. Women had a much greater chance of transmission of the sickness than men. This was because women generally ate morsels from the brain tissue and men did not. There are varying accounts of whether this was because men took choice cuts of meat and women were stuck with consuming organ meat or because women prepared the food and ate the brain as a delicacy. Since women too had contact with blood and tissues when they were doing the food preparation they too faced risks of opportunistic infections from open sores or cuts.
A large scale campaign of educating the Fore people of Papua Modern Guinea as to the cause of this weird sickness successfully eradicated it, along with a crackdown by Australian officials (Papua Modern Guinea was under Australian control at the time) on the strange custom of eating of the dead. Due to the long incubation period of the sickness, it takes years after the initial infection to exhibit symptoms. Although it took a long time for every case of the fatal sickness to run its course, it is now thought to be a really extinct sickness.
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