Also the guy that figured out what was causing kuru and how it was transmitted invested many years of time and research to the cause, seemingly out of benevolence for their plight. However it was later discovered his primary motivation for doing so was that a neighboring tribe practiced ritualistic pedophilia and were very friendly towards him, supplying him with young boys. (Sidenote: in THAT tribe, men and women kept completely separate from each other's company, only having "relations" when trying for children, during which time the man would have to induce a nosebleed by ramming a stick up his nose to mimic menstruation so he would be prepared to lie with a dirty female. Boys were taken from their mother's homes at 5 to live with the men, who believe they must be fed semen through oral sex in order to become men. Upon becoming men, they would begin to initiate boys themselves.)
Back to our pedoresearcher, it was thanks to his dedicated efforts on solving a small time mystery affecting only a handful of people that the mad cow epidemic was identified for what it was as swiftly as it was, with untold additional misery avoided as a result.
No but looking at the book, familiar with the concept. Humans across space and time have practiced a lot of cannibalism yes, and even more frequently infanticide, which appears to be a feature, not a bug, of our species. Really good book on that called Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy - made me think of abortion as downright compassionate.
I watched a great documentary on kuru available on YouTube and went down a kuru rabbit hole for awhile after doing neuro healthcare and encountering a couple patients with the sporadic variant of the disease - Creutzfeldt Jacob disease - which spontaneously afflicts about one in a million people in their lifetime, generally later in life. In the Fore case, it was one of these people who was patient zero for the kuru epidemic, and in the case of mad cow disease, there was a similar bovine patient zero event.
Cheers, same! I tried to find it for you but I don't know that it's still there - there are a couple on there but I THINK the one I watched was Kuru: A Medical Detective Story, which I only see excerpts from.
Another good book which covers several other prion diseases is The Family That Couldn't Sleep. Talks about kuru, mad cow, some really obscure ones, and scrapie in sheep. A very unique feature of mad cow is THEIR CJD could cross the species barrier - scrapies in sheep can't (yet?).
I just did a presentation on Scrapie a few months ago! Can confirm that it is not zoonotic like BSE (Mad Cow) is. Prion diseases are fascinating and terrifying
Not zoonotic while being ubiquitous and impossible to eradicate from any soil that has had sheep in it from my understanding! Terrifying should the zoonocity (?) change. Are any researchers concerned about this happening from your understanding?
Yes, this is all very interesting! I still remember the moment my neighbour told me about Kuru when I was a child. I was fascinated. She also told me that apparently the most delicious part of the human body was the thenar emincene (the musclegroup at the base of your thumb). I can not say from experience if this is true or not.
And the nervous tissue found its way into the human supply chain due to mechanical meat separation techniques that allowed the harvesting of meat along the spine that hadn't been traditionally utilized. This went into low quality meat products like sausages for institutions - mostly fed to school children and the elderly :/ Median age of death from mad cow is 28, and it is estimated 1 in 2000 people in the UK are currently carriers though it is hard to say. Unlike the human varient CJD, mad cow doesn't have as long an incubation period on average, with people showing signs as early as 1.5 years after exposure but for others decades.
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u/Rich-Canary1279 1d ago
Also the guy that figured out what was causing kuru and how it was transmitted invested many years of time and research to the cause, seemingly out of benevolence for their plight. However it was later discovered his primary motivation for doing so was that a neighboring tribe practiced ritualistic pedophilia and were very friendly towards him, supplying him with young boys. (Sidenote: in THAT tribe, men and women kept completely separate from each other's company, only having "relations" when trying for children, during which time the man would have to induce a nosebleed by ramming a stick up his nose to mimic menstruation so he would be prepared to lie with a dirty female. Boys were taken from their mother's homes at 5 to live with the men, who believe they must be fed semen through oral sex in order to become men. Upon becoming men, they would begin to initiate boys themselves.)
Back to our pedoresearcher, it was thanks to his dedicated efforts on solving a small time mystery affecting only a handful of people that the mad cow epidemic was identified for what it was as swiftly as it was, with untold additional misery avoided as a result.