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KURU WAS SHOWN TO BE TRANSMISSIBLE BY A CHIMP TEST
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OKAY BACK FROM THE FIELD CAMP 🏕️
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SORCERY WAS THE FORE EXPLANATION 🔮
Kuru Was A Fatal Shaking Disease Among The Fore Of Papua New Guinea
The Fore Believed Sorcerers Were Responsible For The Calamity
In 1961 And 1962 They Spent Much Time Trying To Find Them
That Search Cost Material Wealth And Emotional Energy
The Fore Took Sick People On Healing Trips To Distant Curers
Their Most Striking Trips Went To The Neighbouring Gimi People
More Than 70 Patients Consulted A Gimi Curer In 1961
Those Visits Came Between April And August
The Treatment Included Bloodletting And Medicinal Barks And Leaves
That Curer Also Named Where The Guilty Sorcerer Might Be Found
Back Home Sick Women Sometimes Named Their Attacker After A Dream
With Women Present Men Ran Divination Tests To Reveal The Sorcerers
Some Tests Suggested The Sorcerers Might Be Close Neighbours
That Often Led To New Tensions
The Fore Began Holding Public Meetings To Denounce Sorcery
At Those Meetings They Spoke About Past Animosities
The Main Debate Was Whether Kuru Was A Sickness Or Sorcery
One Anthropologist Wrote As The Kuru Epidemic Drew To A Close
By Then Kuru Sorcerers Were No Longer Believed In
A Few Fore Even Spoke Of Kuru As A Form Of Sickness
Yet Their Views About Sorcery In General Did Not Change
Researcher John Mathews Gave A Different Account
He Wrote That Most Fore Still Blame Sorcery For Kuru
The Fore Saw The Evidence That Led Science To Blame Eating The Dead
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DOCTORS FAVORED A GENETIC CAUSE 🐑
By 1961 Medical Investigators Most Favored A Genetic Explanation
Henry Bennett Was One Of The First To Propose It
A Grant He Provided Let Two Anthropologists Start Work In July 1961
The Two Were Robert Glasse And Shirley Lindenbaum
Bennett Expected Fore Family Records To Confirm His Theory
Instead Many Victims Turned Out Not To Be Closely Related By Blood
They Were Kin In A Sense That Was Not Biological
The Anthropologists' 1962 Data Suggested Kuru Reached Villages Slowly
That Had Happened Within Living Memory
Its Progress Through Fore Territory Followed A Traceable Route
Mathews Later Observed That Kuru Was Too Common
It Was Also Too Fatal To Be A Purely Genetic Disorder
That Would Need A Mechanism Keeping A Kuru Gene At High Frequency
No Evidence Existed For Such A Mechanism
Years Earlier A Clue Had Come From An American Scientist In England
William Hadlow Studied Scrapie For The US Department Of Agriculture
Scrapie Is A Slow Brain Disease Of Sheep And Goats
In June 1959 A Friend Told Him About A Museum Exhibit In London
Five Days Later Hadlow Saw The Exhibit Himself
The Exhibit At The Wellcome Medical Museum Was On Kuru
Hadlow Then Wrote A Letter That Ran In The Lancet In September 1959
It Pointed Out A Striking Similarity Between Kuru And Scrapie
He Suggested Kuru Might Be Transmissible After A Long Incubation
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THE CHIMPANZEE INOCULATION TEST 🐒
Mathews Named Two Reasons Carleton Gajdusek Turned To Primates
One Was Hadlow's Observation About Kuru And Scrapie
The Other Was The Anthropologists' Suggestion Of A Slow Infection
Gajdusek Led A Research Group At The National Institutes Of Health
Brain Material From A Kuru Patient Was Injected Into A Chimpanzee
It Went Directly Into The Animal's Brain
The First Chimpanzee To Fall Ill Was Named Georgette
Georgette Developed Symptoms Of Kuru In May 1965
That Was Just 20 Months After The Inoculation
The Experimental Transmission Was Reported In 1966
Hadlow Wrote That This Made The Link With Scrapie More Certain
Kuru Became The First Human Prion Disease Shown To Be Transmissible
Before 1966 The Anthropologists' Findings Drew Little Attention
That Attention Was Often Sceptical
The Anthropologists' Idea Was That Kuru Was Caught By Eating The Dead
In 1966 The Chimp Test Gave That Idea Credence
One Review Says The Chimpanzee Work Won Gajdusek A Nobel Prize
A Colleague Tied The Prize Instead To A Related Disease Called CJD
He Shared The 1976 Prize With Baruch Blumberg
It Was For New Mechanisms Of How Infectious Diseases Arise And Spread
