Kuru (disease)
The kuru was discovered in New Guinea at the beginning of the XXe century.
Currently, it is known that the kuru is a disease with request (among which one finds the disease of the Mad cow).
The disease of the kuru was described in the tribe of Fores New Guinea by D.C. Gajdusek (Nobel Prize of medicine 1976). Though distinct from the Disease of Creutzfeldt-Jacob, the kuru is also a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. Its mode of transmission could be connected a funerary rite anthropophagous.
The kuru among aboriginals
The first case seems to be described in the years 1920, but medicine is interested in it since the years 1950. The disease concerns a population aboriginal heights of the east of the New Guinea, which consumed the body of late at the time of a religious ritual. This cannibalism seems to be stopped in the middle of the years 1950 pennies the pressure of the Australian administration.It touched especially the women and the children who ate the central nervous system. The men, consuming the muscles, were saved. It seems that there exists a genetic susceptibility also explaining the specific attack of this population.
The full number of case borders the 2700.
Symptoms of the kuru
The incubation period (time between the contamination by the prion and the first signs of the disease) can be lower than 5 years, but the existence of ten case more than 50 years after the stop of any cannibalism makes raise the question of an incubation much longer.The disease primarily appears by a cérébelleux Syndrome with a disorder of balance and coordination of the movements. A table of Démence can supplement the whole, leading to the death in a few years.
References
- '' Kuru in the 21st long century-year acquired human prion disease with very incubation periods ''. J Collinge, J Whitfield, E McKintosh, J Beck, S Mead, D Thomas, Mr. Alpers, Lancet, 367,2006,2068-2073