🚀 go-pugleaf

Ron Ackermann wrote:
> 
> >> somebody wrote:
> >>
> >> : women.  It turns out that the men got the choice pieces (isn't that
> >> : typical) while the women had to be content with things like viscera and
> >> : brains.  The brains are the tissue that carry the disease.
> >>
> >>  somebody else wrote:
> >>
> >> Interesting. Do you have a cite for this?
> 
> check http://www.airtime.co.uk/bse/tse.htm for more info on this,
> specifically the section on Kuru.
> 
> --
> Ron Ackermann              DoD # 0462             GWTA LIFE MEMBER # 484
> ackrmnn@wolfenet.com                       ackerman@bcstec.ca.boeing.com
> Poverty Bay Wings GWTA        -      http://www.prostar.com/web/pbwings/
>                             RTE,ETR

I looked at the web page and I've appended the section on Kuru to this post, for 
those of you who don't have browsers or don't have the time.

I think Jennifer S. Mullen owes me a public apology.

	Steve Barnard


Kuru is a condition of the Fore tribe of the Okapa district of the Eastern 
Highland in Papua New
Guinea, in which a practice of ritual cannibalism of fellow tribesmen took place 
until around 1956.
The disease affected mainly adult woment and children of both sexes to give an 
annual disease
specific mortality of approximately 3%. Most deaths of women occured through 
this disease and
some men who died from this disease were thought to have contracted it when 
young.

Kuru is caught by eating infected tissue. The brain of the dead tribal member 
was eaten by women
and children and the muscle tissue by men. The possibility that has also 
transmitted the disease to
men but with a lower dose of infective agent and, hence, a longer incubation 
period has not been
ruled out. The cohort of children born since 1956 has not suffered greatly from 
kuru. 

Clinically the disease is of a progressive cerebellar ataxia leading to 
uncoodinated movements,
neurological weakness, palsies, and decay in brain cortical function. Most 
patients dying of kuru
are not demented, and this is a major clinical difference between kuru and CJD. 
Patients with a
longer incubation period appear to have a slower progression of symptions, but 
generally death
from inter current infection or medullary involvement takes place with an 
average clinical period of
12 months.