BSE or mad cow disease ravaged UK cattle in the 1980s. Sixty years ago, the little-known Kuru disease gave early warning of its still-unclear human effects ...

Kuru shares a link with the well-known mad cow disease, recently identified at a farm in Aberdeenshire. However, Kuru exists in a much different and more sinister vein than its loose relation.

Might sound like an uncanny name but the Kuru disease is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder that was historically found among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. This disease had its presence in ...

The tribe stopped practicing cannibalism in the late 1950s, which lead to a decline in kuru. But because the disease can take many years to show up, cases continued to appear for decades.

Codon 129 heterozygosity is protective against the development of iatrogenic 8 and sporadic 9 Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and kuru 3,10–12; all clinical cases of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob ...