Kuru — the laughing disease

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34151, 12 May 1976, Page 10

Kuru — the laughing disease

(By

JOHN WASILIEV,

A.A.P. correspondent)

PORT MORESBY. Kuru, the once mysterious and dreaded “laughing sickness” o£ the Papua New Guinea highlands, is at last disappearing.

According to medical experts, the disease — which in the 1950 s was killing hundreds of men, women, and children — is on the wane because a stop has been put to a custom which used to be common in many parts of the country — ritual cannibalism.

Dr Carleton Gadjusek, the American researcher who, along with a local health officer, Dr Vincent Zigas, is credited with pioneering work on kuru, believes the end of this cannibalism will eventually see the disease disappear completely. He also believes that knowledge gained about kuru will help in the study of similar complaints around the world. Dr Gadjusek has been travelling between the United States and the Okapa sub-province of the Papua New Guinea eastern highlands for the last 19 years

trying to solve the mystery of kuru. Kuru, an invariably fatal disease which attacks the nervous system, became known as the “laughing sickness of New Guinea’’ because of a gruesome resemblance to laughter in the faces of victims racked by muscular spasms. During a recent visit to Papua New Guinea, Dr Gadjusek said he believed the disease was under control, but it was still being extensively studied by medical investigators around the world who were using it as a model to gain understanding of similar sicknesses. “Kuru itself is disappearing. This is, we believe, the result of the stopping of the old mourning right of respect shown to the dead, of eating their brain.”

Dr Gadjusek said the ritualistic cannibalism involved opening up a dead person’s brain, cooking it and then eating it as a sign of respect. In this way, if a dead person suffered from kuru, the disease was passed on. It is also transmitted by contaminated hands, leading to the infection of most in-

fants and children in the families of deceased kuru victims.

Dr Gadjusek attributed the halt in mourning cannibalism to Government and church influence. But, 30 years ago cannibalism was still quite common in many remote jungle areas of Papua New Guinea, which were then only just starting to come into contact with modern civilisation. “Everyone born since the practise in a given village stopped is no longer infected, and we have no example of a baby being born with kuru, since this cannibal rite stopped," Dr Gadjusek said. He said the incidence of kuru had dropped to less than a tenth of what it used to be in the 19505. “As a disease of children, which in the 19505,' was frequent enough to infect and produce disease in dozens, even a hundred children a year, it has totally disappeared from the world.

“In the last five years, there has been no child with kuru and in the last two years, no adolescent with kuru.

Nowadays, he said, kuru was aiding medical investigators throughout the world to close in on similar diseases which had a much wider scope and killed many more people. “It was the first of the chronic degenerative diseases of the brain proved to be a virus infection, a peculiar slow infection, and it has been used as a model for studying diseases which are more widely dissemminated in the world. “In fact the viruses of one group are almost identical to the kuru virus, so much so that no laboratory in the world can separate them or distinguish this world-wide virus from kuru. Dr Gadjusek said the world-wide viruses were killing people in all five continents, causing thousands of deaths a year. The diseases proved to be like kuru are called presenile dementures and they affect mainly those ranging in age from 20 to 60. They cause the same effects as kuru with associated muscular disorders and jerking muscular fits.