2023-05-12 16:33:19
Cannibalism is considered a taboo subject in most cultures, while in some exotic places it is still practiced today. However, in addition to its thousands of creepy faces, it also comes with a special danger.
In 1961, a young Australian medical researcher, Michael Alpers, went to the eastern part of New Guinea, where he began to investigate a mysterious disease in which the cannibal Fore tribe suffered. Scientific text by Alpers according to those who live in the mountains are “a human body was eaten out of love and gastronomic appreciation”. This condition was called kuru, in which up to 200 people were killed each year, sometimes in shocking circumstances.
The mystery of the laughing death
The disease from cannibalism first began with tremors. The patients completely lost their bodily functions and became depressed, which sometimes manifested itself in hysterical laughter. When news of the disease reached the West, the media “laughing to death” named it. The Fore tribe believed it to be a terrible curse, but Alpers sought a more scientific explanation for the mystery. It was interesting that the condition was not caused by a virus, and only women and children fell ill. And this made the researchers think… According to custom, women and children ate only the brain, while men ate the meat, which explained the appearance of the disease. It was also possible to conclude that the disease was not transmitted from mother to child, and that it was not caused by a viral infection or bacterial disease, but by a mysterious pathogen, the prion. Prions are essentially proteins that “to the dark side” they turned. They were able to “normal” protein into prions and thereby become infectious. The diseases caused by prions also include the human form of BSE, otherwise known as “mad cow disease”. And the disease is eerily similar to the kuru epidemic of the Fore tribe.
In 2015, however, the story took a turn, as according to a study published in the journal Nature, those who regularly consume brains became resistant to prion diseases. To this day, the discovery still helps scientists understand some cases of degenerative brain diseases, such as mad cow disease and dementia.
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