In 1932, in the mountains of New Guinea, the Papuan Fore tribe, previously unknown to science, was discovered. This became a truly invaluable gift for ethnographers and anthropologists, who could now use “living material” to study the features of life of primitive tribes.
The gift, of course, is rather dubious. Because the Papuans from the Fore were not peaceful root gatherers or ordinary hunters, they actively practiced cannibalism. Some of their rituals simply shocked the civilized public, especially Christian priests, who ventured to poke their attention to these little cannibals in 1949 with sermons about love for their neighbor.
The Papuans loved their neighbors very much even without priests. True, from a gastronomic point of view. The ritual eating of the brain of a deceased relative was especially popular with these cannibals. Moreover, in this rite, the main participants were women and children. The Papuans sincerely believed that by eating the brain of their deceased relative, they would acquire his mind, as well as other virtues and virtues.
Eyewitnesses describe this ceremony as follows: “Women and girls dismember the corpses of the dead with their bare hands. After separating the brain and muscles, they lay them with their bare hands in specially prepared bamboo cylinders, which are then briefly kept on hot stones in pits dug in the ground … A little time passes, and women and children begin to crowd around the hearths in impatient anticipation when the cylinders are finally opened, will extract the contents and the feast will begin."
DRY AND DAMAGE
One of the then mission workers once saw a little girl who was clearly ill: “She was trembling violently, and her head shook spasmodically from side to side. I was told that she was a victim of witchcraft and that this trembling would continue until her death. Until she dies, she will not be able to eat. She must die in a few weeks."
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The Papuans from Fore called this terrible attack the word "kuru", which in their language has two meanings - "trembling" and "spoilage". And the reason for kuru is the evil eye of someone else's sorcerer.
But if everything was exclusively in the witch's evil eye … Of course, official medicine in the person of the American doctor Carlton Gaidushek did not believe in spoilage. Gaidushek appeared among the Fore tribe in 1957. He was the first to give a scientific description of kuru, which European doctors had never encountered before. Initially, the coordination of movements is disturbed in patients, the gait becomes unstable. There is a headache, a runny nose, a cough, and the temperature rises.
As the disease progresses, the characteristic symptom of kuru appears - tremors of the limbs and head. In the last stages, coordination is already broken so much that a person stops moving. All this lasts approximately 10-16 months and ends in death.
In some patients in the last stages, uncontrolled laughter or a crooked smile suddenly appeared. This symptom allowed some "poets" to call kura a "laughing" disease.
BRAIN AS A SPONGE
Observing the doomed patients, Gaidushek suggested that this disease primarily affects the brain. An autopsy confirmed his guess: in patients with kuru, the brain degraded within several months, turning into a spongy mass. Not a single modern medicine could save the unfortunates: neither antibiotics, nor sulfonamides, nor hormones.
The doctor was at a loss. Even tissue samples sent to America for research could not shed light. Yes, tests have shown that with kuru, the destruction of the nerve cells of the cerebellum is observed. But why is this happening? What is the reason? Some kind of infection?
For six whole years Gaydushek fought over the riddle of kuru, until he accidentally saw in one scientific journal materials devoted to scrapie - an equally mysterious disease that affects, however, sheep.
Gauydushek immediately noticed that animals who fell ill with scrapie died almost the same way as sick kuru. When the researchers injected the brain matter from a sick sheep to a healthy one, the latter fell ill. True, in a year …
Therefore, it was a delayed infection. And, having analyzed everything, Gaidushek suggested: what if kuru is also something from similar "slow" infections?
DO NOT EAT CLOSE YOURS
And he was right! He did almost the same thing as his colleagues with the sheep - he injected the brain extract of two chimpanzees who died from kuru. The chimpanzees got sick, but not after a month, and not even after three or four - the disease manifested itself only after two years!
Gaidushek later found out that kuru does not have the usual infectious symptoms. And pathogens are not visible. But this does not mean that they do not exist. Gaidushek drew attention to the fact that mainly women and children suffered from this disease. And men - in very rare cases. And the researcher made the right conclusion - cannibalism is to blame! It is women and children who participate in ritual eating of human flesh, while men eat beans and sweet potatoes.
Infected meat is the main source of chicken contamination. As soon as cannibalism was over, the kuru cases practically disappeared. Gaidushek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for his sensational research. He donated money from the prize to the long-suffering I tribe Fore.
DEADLY SLOW
According to some scientists, "slow" viruses are one of the most terrible phenomena in our reality. They are not affected by any of the poisons. They do not die even under irradiation and ultra-high temperatures, from which all living things die.
Slow viruses are 10 times smaller than the smallest common virus. These internal saboteurs behave in a special way: they undermine the body slowly and gradually, and the diseases they cause are more similar to wear and tear and self-destruction than to illness.
Scientists these days don't know how to deal with insidious "slow" viruses. They can only speak in awe of these newly discovered viruses as "the most mysterious and exciting object of medicine today."