The Kuru Cannibal Disease

Join Kelli as she talks about a prion disease called Kuru. Prion diseases occur when misfolded proteins duplicate and clog up the brain, and cause things like Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Kuru. Kuru was specific to the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, and at its peak, killed 200 women and children people a year. But to get Kuru, they must have consumed the brains of the infected dead...

Let's dive deep into the Fore peoples, prion diseases and more cannibalism.

New year, same old me. Happy 2024!

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Chapters

• 0:28 Intro
• 3:16 Historical Context
• 11:23 Scientific Context
• 14:07 Other Prion Diseases
• 19:45 Kuru in the Fore
• 27:32 The Wendigo and Cannibalism
• 30:06 Outro

Transcript

The Kuru Cannibal Disease
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird. 

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And now, on with the show!

Happy New Year’s everyone! We’re almost a week into the new year, and I thought - what better way to celebrate than with what is apparently my favorite topic - cannibalism!

Did you know - you can get diseases from eating other humans?

Today’s episode will be about Kuru - a rare, and incurable disease transmitted through the consumption of contaminated brain tissue. Any not just any contaminated brain tissue, mind you, but brains that are filled with damaged prions - proteins found in the brains. You may have heard of prion diseases before - things like mad cow disease, which is the colloquial, or more commonly known version of, bovine spongiform encephalitis. Mad cow disease can and has been transmitted to humans, and our version is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. If you pay attention to the news, another prion disease is going around Yellowstone right now in populations of elk and deer - chronic wasting disease. Sheep and goats can get prion diseases too; we call it scrapie.

And don’t you worry - we’ll talk about alllll that stuff today. And for good measure, we’ll throw in some Algonquin American indigenous mythology too, because I want to talk about  Wendigos - evil spirits that are said to possess humans and turn them into cannibals.

New year… old me. Still gonna talk way too much about cannibalism in 2024. So let’s dive into the diseases that mess with our minds and kill cannibals. 

Historical Context
Now for those of you who are seasoned APHOUT veterans by this point, you know that we usually start off the show with historical context. Context is always important - it’s the background information needed to understand the topic - how and why does this topic even exist, right? For example, in the last episode, I covered the Inca Mummies, which meant we needed to understand how and why the Inca came to exist, and what about their culture led them to sacrifice young children and leave their bodies to mummify on the tops of mountains.

Well this week, to properly understand Kuru, we need to talk about the Fore people of Papua New Guinea and how they contracted this disease in the first place. 

Papua New Guinea is a sovereign nation that makes up the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. It’s located north of Australia and is part of Oceania - just to give you some geographic context there. So, for most of my listeners, it’s on the other side of the world.

In the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors went digging around on the island of New Guinea and ran into roughly a million people living up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Prior to this, nobody really knew anyone lived up there, so we’re talking about a population of uncontacted indigenous peoples who numbered in the millions. The land itself had changed hands a bunch before this, in the age of imperialism, but the indigenous peoples more or less kept to themselves. And so, they had their own cultural and religious practices that developed in isolation. And they are super different from your traditional Afroeurasian practices.

And though there are countless tribes and family groups, we are going to focus on the Fore people, the ones who developed Kuru.

In the 1950s, researchers and anthropologists - those who study human cultures, societies, and beliefs - came across around a group of 11,000 Fore indigenous people. For anthropologists - a huge score. A new, relatively uncontacted group? A chance to see how indigenous peoples live without access to modern technology or the combined knowledge and advancements of the connected world? It’s like looking back in time to see how our earliest ancestors lived in the Neolithic period, right? Amazing stuff.

Now before I go on - there is a risk to contacting isolated tribes - you risk spreading modern diseases. If an isolated group of people have never seen outsiders before, have never interacted with anyone outside of their own family and kinship groups, then they don’t have tolerance or immunity to the whole host of diseases that we’ve been spreading back and forth since we formed agricultural settlements around 9,000 years ago, right? I mean smallpox was never in the New World until after the Europeans came and took over, and it’s responsible for knocking out somewhere between 50-80% of all indigenous American populations. It’s the primary reason why the Inca and Aztec Empires fell. And even today, isolated tribes are still at risk of death and annihilation because of this lack of immunity.

Short side tangent. Maybe. In Brazil, there are at least 114 isolated groups living in the vast Amazon jungle, though we can only confirm the continued existence of 28 of them. One guy became famous - he didn’t know about it of course, because he stayed isolated - but he became famous because he was the last man left of his tribe, the Tanaru. We kept tabs on this guy - we don’t know his name, but we called him “Man of the Hole.” He… dug a lot of holes.

The Tanaru were mostly wiped out between the 1970s and 1990s by Brazilian settlers taking their lands. Man of the Hole was the only survivor, and he went deeper into the forest to continue living out his life. He built over 50 huts, and after he abandoned a hut, researchers would find a deep hole in there. Though he didn’t have direct contact with outsiders, Brazil’s indigenous government agency, called FUNAI, would leave him seeds and tools, stuff like that. 

In 2018, drone footage was published showing him alone maintaining his village. The idea was to spread awareness of the dangers that uncontacted indigenous groups face. Sadly, he was found dead in 2022, lying in his hammock, adorned with feathers, seemingly awaiting death. A sad, lonely life, and with his death, so too died another indigenous group.

The Fore in Papua New Guinea are still alive and kicking - their numbers are estimated at around 20,000 today - but this little side story is another example of the dangers facing uncontacted groups - disease and conflict can devastate isolated peoples.

Ok, sorry, that was a bigger tangent than I planned. I just find this stuff really fascinating.

So when the Fore were first contacted by anthropologists in the 1950s, the researchers were of course careful not to spread diseases. But influenza had already swept over most of the country, so they were slightly less susceptible to modern diseases that would ravage those like Man of the Hole. But it wasn’t external diseases that plagued them - it was a disease local only to the Fore, and it was called Kuru.

Kuru, also known colloquially as laughing sickness, was killing off around 200 Fore people a year. The symptoms included muscle twitching and involuntary muscle spasms, loss of coordination and difficulty walking, behavioral and mood changes, hallucination, and a rapid onset of dementia. Someone suffering from Kuru also had difficulty eating, which means they also usually got malnutrition. There is no cure, it is 100% fatal, and death comes usually within a year.

For all my hypochondriacs out there panicking and checking WebMD right now because you forgot what you ate for breakfast - hold your horses. There’s only one way to get Kuru, and it’s consuming diseased human brain tissue. So unless you’re cannibalizing the brain of someone infected with prion disease, you won’t get Kuru.

Let’s go into the science of that real quick - I want to understand more about how prions are related to the brain, how they can get all wibbly and damaged, and ultimately how only the Fore contracted Kuru.

Scientific Context
Prions are organisms that are made up of proteins. The problem with prions is that they can cause normal brain proteins to fold over in weird ways. You may think - who cares? Let the protein fold if it wants, man, it’s 2024! But you see the problem with these abnormally folded proteins in the brain is that they are mutations, and - to oversimplify things and make it easier to understand - they cause two big problems. First, they trigger other proteins to start folding in weird ways, and second, these growing numbers of clumped proteins accumulate and smoosh together, getting in the way of normal operations up there, which causes brain cells to die. 

Also, that’s got to be, just, the worst X-Men mutation, right? No superpowers here - juuuust death.

I wish I could tell you more about the science of misfolded prions, but honestly, the scientific community just doesn’t know a crazy amount about prion diseases. And since prion diseases are fatal and progress rapidly, it’s not like we can study them in a single patient over a long period of time.

Now can your brain proteins just start folding weirdly out of nowhere? Not usually. 

There are three main risk factors - 
You have a family history of prion disease, meaning it’s congenital - you’re born with it. It’s a genetic mutation.
You’ve eaten meat that has misfolded prions in it, like beef from a cow infected with “Mad Cow Disease.” More on that in a bit.
You got an infection from contaminated corneal tissue implants - that's cornea as in the clear outer layer of your eyeballs - or contaminated medical equipment during said procedure.

How do you find out you’ve got a prion disease? Well, since it impacts the brain, you would need to get a sample of brain tissue - a biopsy. You can also get a spinal tap. And that just sounds awful and terrifying. Plus, spinal taps hurt - the pain is dialed up to 11! You can also examine brain tissue post-mortem - after death - during an autopsy.

Other Prion Diseases
We’ll come back to Kuru and cannibalism in a bit, but first I want to talk about some of the other prion diseases out there. 

Let’s start with Mad Cow Disease. 

Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis affects cows and is a result of these misfolded proteins. It was first noticed in cows in the UK in 1986, and since then, more than 185,000 cases have been diagnosed in the world, including in the US. But don’t panic - there were only 5 confirmed cases in the US, ranging from 2003 to 2017. 

Now interestingly, mad cow disease is not transmissible from cow to cow - Betsy can’t give it to Daisy by licking her face, okay? It’s contracted through contaminated cattle feed - contaminated, unfortunately, by other cows infected with mad cow disease. You see, the parts of the cow that we don’t eat are cooked, dried, and ground into a fine powder. I’m gonna call this cow dust. So what do we do with cow dust? Well it’s used for a bunch of things - and I’m absolutely not going down that rabbit hole - but one of the things cow dust is used for is cow feed. I guess we force cows to become cannibals. 

So if cows get infected by feed contaminated with sick cows, how did the original cow get sick? Well remember, it’s a mutation - so a cow one day had a mutation that caused prions to fold over, which made the cow sick. He or she was ground up into cow dust, mixed into cow feed, and boom - more infected cows. When those cows die, they are turned into cow dust, put into more feed… exponential growth.

It’s the same with sheep and goats, but we call that one scrapie. And deer and elk get chronic wasting disease. But that one gets a fun nickname too - we also sometimes call it “zombie deer disease” because the affected animals stagger, lower their heads, become dull, and then drop dead. They essentially wander around like zombies until they collapse.

Can we cure animals with prion diseases? No. And apparently, the prions survive after death, as proven by how cow dust made from a cow that was infected with prion disease can transmit it. To kill the prions, we need to denature the protein - kill it with fire.

But the bigger question here, maybe one you’ve wondered since I started mentioning all these animals… can humans get sick from eating meat from an animal infected with prion disease?

Well, actually, yes - but it’s super, super rare. We don’t know about scrapie or chronic wasting disease, but there are reported cases of us humans contracting the human form of mad cow disease from eating diseased cattle - we call it Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. CJD.

CJD, like all the others, is a fatal, rapidly progressing prion disease. You can get CJD through consuming infected brain tissue, or through contaminated blood, like if you got an infusion. In the UK, 5 people have become infected with CJD through contaminated blood transfusions. Which sucks. But you can also get CJD from eating infected beef. It’s rare, but it happens. 

So what happens when there’s a population of cows that are suspected to have or confirmed to have mad cow disease? We don’t want to risk getting a 100% fatal brain disease, right?

They’re all killed and burned.

The peak of the mad cow disease epidemic in the UK was from 1992-1993, and in this time, there were more than 100,000 confirmed cases. IN COWS, not humans, jesus christ. Can you imagine? But because we can’t really get the data except from autopsying dead cows, the UK didn’t want to take the risk - 4.4 million cows were slaughtered.

Today, mad cow disease is super rare, especially in the US. In fact, most cases of mad cow disease have been in the UK and Europe more generically, so again, please don’t panic.

But as we know, it’s not just eating infected cattle that can give you prion diseases. You can also get it from eating the infected brains of humans. And that, my friends, brings us back to Kuru, Papua New Guinea, and the Fore people.
Kuru in the Fore
Now the Fore people engaged in what we call ritual cannibalism - not survival or subsistence cannibalism. In fact, they had a pretty varied diet, so they didn’t need to eat each other for survival. So what about their culture and beliefs led to ritual cannibalism?

Well, it’s actually pretty interesting. It’s something so foreign to western principles that it’s hard to stomach. Pun intended.

First, it’s important to note that it was typically just the women and children who contracted Kuru. Not the men. Anthropologists, when they stumbled on the troubled Kuru, tried to figure out what could be causing this laughing sickness - why only the women and children? First, they tried genetic testing. Was there something genetically passed down through the Fore that caused this? They didn’t find anything abnormal.

But then they looked into the Fore’s burial practices.

In many Fore villages, when a person from their community died, parts of their body would be cooked and consumed. To us in the west, we immediately go to, like, Jeffrey Dahmer, right? But no - it wasn’t done as a form of violence - it was meant to be a sign of love, grief, and mourning. As crazy as that sounds, to people like the Fore (and other groups who engage in funerary cannibalism), this was a better alternative to burying them in the ground.

In a 2007 article on the History of Kuru, M.P. Alpers wrote that, quote, 

“the mortuary practice of consumption of the dead and incorporation of the body of the dead person into the bodies of living relatives… [helped] to free the spirit of the dead; this practice had deep significance for the Fore people and their neighbours.” End quote.

Another word for this act is transumption. And transumption was common in the South Fore group - in a 2008 article on mortuary rites of the South Fore, the authors noted that, quote, 

“In the kuru-affected region, all methods of disposal of the body involved being eaten. If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects. By eating the dead, they were able to show their love and to express their grief. The ritual allowed the [soul] to be recycled within the family and for the loved ones to receive blessings…, which [they believed] would strengthen their [own soul].” End quote.

Summarized more succinctly - it was better to lovingly consume the dead than have worms or maggots eat them underground.

The problem for the Fore is that somewhere along the line, one of the deceased community members had a prion disease. Women and children were primarily responsible for preparing the body for the funeral. As they did so, they would eat brain tissue and membranes. And in consuming that, they contracted the prion disease too. And as they died, more women and children, preparing the body for the funeral, consuming the tainted brain tissue, got sick as well. Now the men would engage in cannibalism too, but they mainly ate muscle tissues, the good stuff, which wasn’t infected with the misfolded prions. Only eating the brain tissue and membrane transmitted the disease, so only the women and children got sick. The cycle continued.

The peak Kuru years for the Fore were the 1950s and 1960s. The government put a ban on cannibalism in 1959, and the Fore people (for the most part) stopped transumption - this slowed down Kuru until it more or less disappeared. It was getting really complicated; as women and children were dying, there was a gender disparity, changing social structures. And because mostly women were getting sick, they’d be accused of witchcraft - it was a big mess.

I’m going to do you a favor and not get into the nitty gritty of how they prepared the body - it was a long ritual that took days, involved burning the body and purifying themselves with it, grinding bones down, cutting holes in the skull to scoop out brain tissue - you know what? I just said I wasn’t going to get into this. I’ll stop.

Now this practice, which I’ve called ritual cannibalism, and funerary cannibalism, is also sometimes called  “endocannibalism.” Lots of words for eating your loved ones! And the Fore weren’t the only group who developed this practice in isolation - the Wari of the Amazon in South America did the same thing. They roasted the remains of their dead and ate them - it was considered a nonviolent means of helping their spirit pass on while strengthening the soul of the community.

I mean, uh, personally, no thanks. Just cremate me and sprinkle me around a tree, please. Don’t turn me into human dust and use my remains to feed other people. Thanks.

A small tangent - the Fore, with their endocannibalism, aren’t the only group of cannibals in Papua New Guinea. The Korowai Tribe practiced ritual cannibalism, but wasn’t to honor their dead - it was a form of punishment and retaliation against those who wronged them. They, too, stopped the practice over time. Though some anthropologists believe that they may still occasionally practice ritual cannibalism to this day.
The Wendigo and Cannibalism
Now because I think it’s cool and I want to talk about it, other indigenous groups have legends or stories about cannibalism too. And the one I’m thinking about in particular is the Wendigo. If you’re a gamer, or into watching Let’s Plays, you might remember the “Until Dawn” series that came out a few years ago. Oh my god, it came out in 2015, which was nine years ago. What in the world?! Geez, I swear, when you get older, time makes less and less sense.

Okay so nine years ago, Until Dawn came out, which re-popularized the myth of the Wendigo. It got some of the facts wrong, though, so let’s talk about it.

The Algonquin indigenous Americans, who live primarily around the Great Lakes region here in the upper US and Canada, tell the story of the Wendigo, a supernatural being associated with winter - he’s not a cool supernatural being, though - he’s a beast who stalks and eats humans. Sometimes, he’s portrayed as a spirit who possesses humans and turns them into cannibals.

The first wendigo, according to folklore, was a hunter who turned to cannibalism during a particularly brutal winter for survival, which turned him into a beast that stalked and ate other humans, or forced them to become cannibals as well. This jives with the Algonquin lore. This is also the basis for one of the subplots of that game I mentioned - Until Dawn.

But if we take a step back - which is what I like to do as a big-picture historian - the wendigo is more than just a creepy folklore, right? The fact that the Algonquin peoples even have this lore is a testament to the presence of cannibalism. It’s the historical context, right? Why do they have legends of cannibal beasts stalking and eating their prey? Possessing them and turning them into cannibals? Because cannibalism must have existed there. But given how brutally cold the winters are in the northern US and Canada, I’d wager a bet that it was more so survival cannibalism. Not the ritual cannibalism we see with groups like the Fore in Papua New Guinea.

But do you know what is similar about them?

If you eat people - you’re gonna get infected with something, and it’s gonna be a bad time.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Kuru Cannibal Disease. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!

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