In 1961, a young Australian medical researcher called Michael Alpers headed to the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, inspired to merge his two passions of medicine and adventure. Here, he began to investigate a mysterious condition suffered by the Fore people, a scarcely touched tribe that lived deep in the mountains and practiced cannibalism. [...]
They called this condition "kuru". Every year, kuru would kill up to 200 people of the tribe, sometimes in startling circumstances. Starting with tremors and an impaired ability to work, sufferers go on to develop a total loss of bodily function, depression, and often emotional instability, sometimes exhibiting itself as hysterical laughter. When word of the disease spread to the west, the media sensationally dubbed it “laughing death”. [...]
So, eating human brains might not always be the best of ideas, even before you get into the whole array of blood-borne illnesses that you could contract, from HIV and hepatitis to E. coli and Ebola. However, here’s where the story takes a turn. A study published in Nature in 2015 found that the Fore people who regularly ate brains had developed a resistance to prion diseases, a discovery that is still helping scientists understand degenerative brain diseases, such mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and some cases of dementia.
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