In the 1950s, the Kourou epidemic reached its peak, killing almost all of Papua New Guinea's indigenous Fore people.
Until the 1930s, few outsiders knew about the existence of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Here is one of the most backward regions in the world, where the Fore people have lived independently for many years and developed a unique culture. One such tradition is the cannibalism ritual, which has led to a pandemic of viruses called Kuru.
Australian gold diggers were the first outsiders to come into contact with the aborigines here. However, the cannibalism of the Fore people and its terrible consequences were not known until more than 20 years later.
For the Fore people, cannibalism is an act of love and longing, and they eat the bodies of deceased loved ones so that they can be together forever. However, this strange ritual is very frightening to outsiders.
Unbeknownst to the Fore people, their traditional behavior led to a encephalopathy circulating among the tribes. It is a deadly brain disorder that causes victims to lose control of their emotions, limbs, and bodily functions. Disturbingly, many victims laugh uncontrollably, and when the symptoms begin to appear, the patient dies a year later.
At the peak of the disease epidemic in the 1950s, 2% of the tribal population died each year from the Kuru virus. At the time, while both Fore and the researchers were aware of this serious phenomenon, they initially did not know what had caused the epidemic. But it didn't take long for everyone to know the terrible truth.
The Fore people firmly believed that eating the bodies of loved ones was a sacred funeral. So, every time a person dies, their bodies are cooked and eaten by their loved ones. The Fore people believed that this ritual could tame the soul of the dead and honor the dead.
One medical researcher explained the Faith of the Fore people this way: "If a corpse is buried, it will be eaten by worms; if it is placed on a platform, it will be eaten by maggots; and Fore believes that it is much better for a corpse to be eaten by people who love the dead than by worms and insects." ”
Australian patrols were the first to notice the spread of the Kuru virus in the frontier areas.
It is usually women who are responsible for eating people, except for the gallbladder, who eat almost every piece of "meat" and organs of the body. Crucially, this includes the brain. However, women sometimes feed "snacks" from corpses to younger children. As a result, it is mainly women and children who are affected by Kourou.
Although missionaries and colonial officials denounced internecine killings between tribes, the ritual was still common among the Fore tribe. When Kuru disease first appeared is unclear. But some researchers believe it first appeared around the 1910s or 1920s, just a few decades before they came into contact with the outside world.
This inference is validated by the history of the Fore tribe, as the disease had been mentioned in their tribal histories before that.
The Fore people gradually realized that the disease was depleting their population. If this continues, in a few more generations, there may be no Fore people.
But at this point, fore people and researchers still face the question of how the disease is transmitted.
Researchers believe contaminants or heredity may have contributed to the disease, but the Fore people believe it is a form of "witchcraft." It wasn't until the early 1960s that researchers were finally able to figure this out.
A young patient, unable to stand on his own.
Anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum and her then-husband, Robert Glass, were among the scientists who specialized in Kuru's disease.
They visited villages from village to village in the Fore tribe to investigate possible causes of the disease. They quickly realized that the disease was not hereditary, as it affected almost exclusively women and children in the same inhabited population, not the same genetic population.
During the second visit, a New Zealand neuroscientist and epidemiologist named Dr RW Hornbrook asked a key question: "What have women and children of the Fore tribe done?" Why don't adult men get sick? The answer was soon clear: they performed a feeding ritual on the deceased relatives at the funeral.
The researchers injected samples of infected human brains into chimpanzees. After a few months, chimpanzees began to show symptoms of Kuru disease.
But even though the core questions that cause Kuru's disease have been answered, there are still some loopholes that need to be filled. After all, the Fore people were not the only group in history to have cannibalized, so why was there no problem before? What about other cannibal tribes?
The patient's cerebellum
Many experts believe that Kuru disease began after a Fore people suffered from a neurological disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which is very similar to Kuru disease.
Both diseases are caused by prions, an abnormal protein that folds in an unusual way, forming lesions in the brain that cause serious damage to the nervous system and even other parts of the body. Both diseases are fatal, usually leading to death about a year after symptoms first appear.
Researchers speculate that fore people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease died sometime before the 1910s or 1920s. When the person's body is eaten, the prion in their brain tissue spreads to the people who have eaten them, who in turn will transmit the disease to the people who have eaten them.
The Kourou outbreak is finally over
When the Fore people learned the cause of the disease, they gradually stopped the cannibalistic etiquette, and the number of sick people gradually decreased.
The last patient with Kourou disease died in 2009. In 2012, the Fore people officially declared the epidemic over.
As for the researchers, they won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries. These findings have also advanced further breakthroughs in neurological diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, and Alzheimer's.
Recently, researchers have found that while Fore's past cannibalistic practices have led to tragedies, it has also led to unique adaptations. In 2015, experts found that some Fore people had mutated a gene that protected them from prions such as mad cow disease, and it could even protect them from some forms of dementia.