Posted on 03/30/2019 11:04:52 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
[Michael] Alpers, now the Professor of International Health at Curtin University in Western Australia... tells me the story of what he found as a young doctor visiting the New Guinea highlands more than 50 years ago... It was in the field, in early 1962, Alpers first met American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who had by then been studying kuru for several years... Unusually, the paper identified the victims Kigea and Eiru -- as well as Daisey and Georgette -- by name... Two weeks later, the paper appeared in the journal Nature. It identified kuru as a new category of infectious disease that caused degeneration of the brain and nervous system, and was capable of crossing the species barrier. The transmissible agent would later be identified as an infectious, self-propagating protein... it lacked its own genes... was called a prion... the first new pathogen identified in more than a century... According to the Fore's complex belief system, each individual has five souls. After death they travel the country on a farewell tour... The most efficient path to the hereafter is for the body to be eaten... It was the women's responsibility to eat the dead... Although small boys joined in, they were generally excluded after about age 10... some people were less susceptible to the effects of kuru than others. A gene providing elderly survivors of Fore mortuary feasts resistance to kuru was also found to occur across thousands of people from other cultures. This suggested that eating human flesh -- and outbreaks of a kuru-like disease -- had occurred widely in the human past... one of humanity's darker secrets. With kuru having all but vanished, and the mechanism for its spread eradicated, the episode might have disappeared into the annals of curiosity. But then, in the mid-1980s, came "mad cow" disease.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
My uncle/preacher told me that joke.
Kuru, the laughing disease, spread by the ingestion of brains, was once common among the Fore people but may have died out. However, anthropological forays into academia reveal a high prevalence of a new transmissible neurologIc disease, the non-laughing disease, spread by ingestion of stupidity. Those affected display delusional thinking on multiple fronts and are utterly unable to laugh at themselves. They tend to react violently when others laugh at their errors.
I’m just now starting the book. Sounds like a good read so far.
liberals?
The whole upcoming tour's on hold because Mick is sick. I think Keith will be last to go, just to mess with everyone. "Glad to be here, glad to be anywhere." -- Keith Richards
And for dessert, lady fingers!
Sounds like Hillary, alright.
Heh, we all should have one of those, eh?
Why don't cannibals eat clowns? They taste funny.
I have a feeling these will continue until everyone is fed up.
Call them whatever YOU like. If it sticks they’ll whine and try to change it
LOL!!
;o])
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