Kuru is a rare disease that was first detected in the early 20th century in New Guinea. In fact, the word kuru is from the Aboriginal language, and means “trembling with fever and cold” or “trembling with fear.”
Science began studying kuru in the mid-20th century. At first, it was believed that it was a hereditary disease, since it had only been registered in the Fore community of New Guinea. However, it was later detected that this disease was transmitted by a slow virus or prion.
How did this prion get into the human body and why had the disease only been detected in one community in New Guinea? It turns out that the infectious protein, or prion, is acquired when people eat the brains of dead humans.
However, beyond ritual cannibalism, other researchers have pointed out that there are patients affected by ingesting the brains of different game animals and monkeys. However, today kuru is considered an eradicated disease.
What is kuru?
Kuru is a very rare neurodegenerative disease, which so far has only been detected in Papua New Guinea. One of the difficulties in its detection is that it has a very long incubation period before the first symptoms appear. It is believed that it takes 10 years to manifest, although cases of up to 50 years have been recorded.
This disease causes death, at most, two years after the first symptoms appear. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that this evil is caused by cannibalistic practices that, incidentally, were completely eradicated from New Guinea in 1960.
The kuru leads to a serious impairment of mental functions. The symptoms are very similar to those of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There is a very similar pathology that appears in cows and is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease .
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