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 ...

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.

For decades, a rare disease crawled across Papua New Guinea. When scientists realized what was behind kuru, it caught everyone by surprise. But similar diseases can still be transmitted through food.

Kuru is a devastating epidemic prion disease that affected a highly restricted geographic area of the Papua New Guinea highlands; at its peak, it predominantly affected adult women and children of ...

Regrettably, in the 1950s, the neurological disease kuru was identified. Anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum established the connection between the Fore's tradition of ritual cannibalism and the ...

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 ...

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.

In cattle, prions cause mad cow disease — they are responsible for the epidemic in Britain of the late ’80s and ’90s that required hundreds of thousands of cattle to be destroyed.

Kuru is caused when people eat human brain or nervous system tissue that is tainted with an infectious protein and results in symptoms nearly identical to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which humans ...