Why is it harmful to eat people? Kuru

Until the 1930s, no one knew that the highlands of Papua New Guinea were inhabited. When Australian gold diggers infiltrated the area, then discovered that it was densely Inhabited.

In the 1950s, researchers finally we got to these places and realized that there live about a million people.

Among the tribe, which has about 11,000 Human researchers have discovered something strange. Up to 200 people a year died from an unexplained disease that Aboriginal people called kuru derives from the word kuria or guria (“to shake”)

At first, the person began to have problems with walking, then gradually the patient lost his ability to walk, lost control above his emotions, then, falling into dementia, began to walk under himself and slowly Died.

After the first symptoms of the kuru death occurred within a year.

Many locals were convinced that it’s the result of witchcraft. The disease primarily affected adults women and children under the age of 8. In some villages, there are almost no young women.

Anropologist Shirley Lindenbaum solve the problem of this mysterious disease.

In 1961, while traveling in Papua from one village to another she found out that the disease is not genetic in nature, as they have been sicked by people of the same and the same social group – women and children in different clans of the tribe.

Shirley Lindenbaum had a hunch what was going on, and she was right. It was due to Funeral. In particular, it was related to eating corpses at funerals.

In many villages, when a man dies, it is cooked and eaten. 

Papuans believed that if the corpse of the deceased to bury, it will be eaten by worms, if left in the sun, it will be eaten by larvae, but it’s better if a man’s corpse is eaten by his loved ones.

As a result of this ritual cannibalism corpse eaten almost completely, except gallbladder.

Shirley Lindenbaum describes a case where from the corpse of the deceased woman was seized brain and prepared in a special way in bamboo stalk with fern.

When the women ate this dish, they treated this kind of delicacy of young children.

Was thought, the cause of the kuru to have been found after a team at the U.S. National Institutes of Health injected infected human brains into chimpanzees and observed chicken symptoms develop in animals a few months later.

But whether it was a virus, a parasite or Bacterium?

It was a whole new infectious the agent, who had no genetic material, could have survived in boiling water and it wasn’t even alive.

Later several years the answer was found. A group of biologists studying the kuru came to the conclusion that the causative agent of the kuru is the so-called “prions” or “protein infectious particles”.

Getting in the human body such proteins caused the degradation of the cerebellum, which, as showed an autopsy of patients, was more like a sponge than a normal cerebellum.

Process penetration of prions is unusual and not fully studied. There is an assumption that “infected” protein, getting into the human body transmits to him part of the DNA, forcing the cells the cerebellum mutated and eventually died as a result of DNA changes.

Probably The kuru epidemic began when one person fell ill with a sporadic disease Creutzfeld-Jakob, a degenerative neurological disorder similar to kuru.

By data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one of the million people in the U.S. develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – the difference is that people in the U.S. rarely come into contact with infected human tissue.

Although Papua ceased the practice of ritual cannibalism more than 50 years ago, cases of kuru have continued to appear for years because prions could demonstrate their effects for decades.

There are there are still a lot of open questions about how and why people get prioned Disease.