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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 07 2016, @08:57PM   Printer-friendly

NPR's "The Salt" column carries the grusome (but interesting) story of a medical mystery:

When researchers made their way to the highlands of Papua New Guinea in the 1950s, they found something disturbing. Among a tribe of about 11,000 people called the Fore, up to 200 people a year had been dying of an inexplicable illness. They called the disease kuru, which means "shivering" or "trembling."

Once symptoms set in, it was a swift demise. First, they'd have trouble walking, a sign that they were about to lose control over their limbs. They'd also lose control over their emotions, which is why people called it the "laughing death." Within a year, they couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves or control their bodily functions.

Shirley Lindenbaum, a medical anthropologist with the City University of New York, who continues to write about the epidemic, knew it couldn't be genetic, because it affected women and children in the same social groups, but not in the same genetic groups. She also knew that it had started in villages in the north around the turn of the century, and then moved south over the decades.
...
Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on: In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief. ... Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.

Finally, after urging from researchers like Lindenbaum, biologists came around to the idea that the strange disease stemmed from eating dead people.

The story goes on to explain that the disease wasn't spread by a virus or a bacterium, fungus, or parasite. It could survive being boiled into soup, and had no DNA. It was a totally new infectious agent.

It was a twisted protein called "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles", that could cause normal proteins in nerve cells to twist just like them, and slowly over long periods of time kill areas of nerve cells in the brain.

The story goes on to cover the similarity to Mad Cow Disease, a species jumping disease also caused by prions, and Chronic Wasting Disease that is affecting mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and moose in 21 states.

The CDC is working with public health authorities in Wyoming and Colorado to monitor hunters for signs of prion disease.

If the Zika doesn't get us, the Kuru probably will.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:26AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:26AM (#398969) Journal

    Different cultures have been documented to do different things with their dead, from mummification, to burying, to burning. Here in the states, we drain their bodily fluids, and replace those fluids with preservatives - basically we pickle our dead, then put them in boxes and bury them. For the most part anyway.

    Think about it - pickled bodies underground. Tell me that isn't strange!

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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 08 2016, @03:57AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday September 08 2016, @03:57AM (#399010) Journal

    When I die I want them to cryofreeze the corpse, then pulverize it and feed plants with it. Not like I'm gonna be using the stupid thing after that; ideally, I won't have *any* sort of fleshly body after this. I always found the idea of embalming and burying the dead weird as hell, just like you do here. Wasteful, too.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday September 12 2016, @06:23AM

      by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 12 2016, @06:23AM (#400538)

      I, too, find embalming strange and wasteful. I am of a mind to donate my body to science, but haven't made arrangements or written up a will. This is a good reminder to do that.

      It would be neat if my body could be used to help research on narcolepsy (I have it and would like to help out), but it looks like you can't specify such things when donating:

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-t-miller/how-to-save-money-by-donating-your-body-to-science_b_2162564.html [huffingtonpost.com]

      That makes sense, as the donated bodies might not go where they are most needed. Supporting any research would be nice, but I also think it would be pretty cool to end up in the cadaver lab portion of anatomy class.