The disease was described in detail in 1957 by the Australian doctor Zygas and the American of Slovak-Hungarian origin Carlton Gajduchek. The word "kuru" in the Fore language has two meanings - "trembling" and "damage". Members of the Fore tribe believed that the disease was the result of an evil eye from a foreign shaman. The disease was spread through ritual cannibalism. However, isolated cases still appear because the incubation period can last more than 30 years. The main signs of the disease are severe trembling and jerky movements of the head, sometimes accompanied by a smile, similar to that which appears in patients with tetanus (risus sardonicus). This, however, is not a typical sign.

In the initial stage, the disease manifests itself as dizziness and fatigue. Then a headache, cramps and, eventually, typical tremors are added. Over the course of several months, brain tissue degrades, turning into a spongy mass. The disease is characterized by the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the central nervous system, especially in the area of ​​the brain that controls human body movements. As a result, control of muscle movements occurs and tremors of the torso, limbs and head develop. This disease occurs mainly in women and children and is considered incurable - after 9-12 months it ends in death.

According to modern data, kuru is a prion infection, one of the types of spongiform encephalopathy.
For his discovery of the infectious nature of the kuru disease, Carlton Gaiduchek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976. He donated the prize money to the Fore tribe. Gaiduchek himself did not recognize the prion theory and was convinced that spongiform encephalopathy was caused by so-called slow viruses. This theory still has supporters, although they are in the minority.

The prion theory of the development of spongiform encephalopathy was developed by another American scientist, Stanley Prusiner, for which he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997.

In 2009, American scientists made an unexpected discovery: Some members of the Fore tribe, thanks to a new polymorphism of the PRNP gene that appeared in them relatively recently, have innate immunity to Kur.

A little history. Since time immemorial, the Fore tribe has lived in the mountains of New Guinea. These people united with the rest of humanity only in 1932. They were discovered by gold miner Ted Eybank.

In 1949, Christian priests appeared among the Papuans. Bad news awaited them - the natives enthusiastically devoured their own kind and found this activity incomparably more exciting than humble prayer. One of the most terrible rituals among the Fore was... relatives eating the brain of a deceased family member! This is how an eyewitness describes the horror:

“The eating of dead relatives, in which women and children took the main part, was considered among the Fore natives as a tribute of respect and mourning. It was believed that by eating the brain of the deceased, relatives acquired his mind and all his virtues... Women and girls dismember the corpses of the dead with their bare hands. Having separated the brain and muscles, they place them with their bare hands into specially prepared bamboo cylinders, which are then kept for a short time on hot stones in holes dug in the ground for this purpose. During this time, women wipe their hands on their bodies and hair, clean their wounds, comb insect bites, wipe their children's eyes and clean their noses. A little time passes, and women and children begin to crowd around the fireplaces, impatiently waiting for the cylinders to be opened, the contents removed, and the feast to begin.”

In addition to wild rituals, the holy fathers were faced with a strange illness. The natives called it "kuru". Later, journalists would call him “the laughing death.” Doctors cannot understand where the terrible disease came from and therefore they write in all encyclopedias that “the disease occurs spontaneously.”

The Aborigines have a more definite opinion on this matter. They believe that this is the revenge of sorcerers.

However, first things first. One day, one of the mission workers, John Mac Arthur, saw a girl behaving strangely: “She was shaking violently, and her head was swaying spasmodically from side to side. I was told that she was a victim of witchcraft and that this trembling continued until her death. She won't be able to eat until she dies. She should die in a few weeks."

Naturally, Europeans could not ignore such “witchcraft.” Soon doctors became interested in the disease, including Carlton Gaidushek. He managed to describe the disease.

First stage: disturbance of gait, coordination of movements, headache, fever, runny nose, cough. As the disease progresses, trembling of the limbs and head occurs 2-3 times per second and only goes away during sleep.

Stage two: a person’s coordination is so impaired that he cannot move. Gradually, a person turns into a “vegetable” and dies after 16 months.

Another terrible symptom of this disease is the patient’s uncontrollable laughter. Some of them suddenly smile. Doctors have not yet explained why this happens. There is a hypothesis that it is due to muscle spasms.

Since the disease is always associated with the development of dementia, Gajdushek immediately realized that the disease affects the brain. This was also evidenced by deterioration in coordination. It is known that when some parts of the brain are removed, a person can only walk in a straight line. If the patient tries to turn, he simply falls.

Autopsies of those who died from kuru completely confirmed the doctor’s theory. The brains of the deceased resembled a sponge in structure. It was also possible to find out that the incubation period of the disease can last up to 20 years.

The doctor was also able to establish how infection occurs. To do this, it was enough to monitor the diet of the aborigines. Gajdusek noted that men who eat mostly beans and sweet potatoes suffer little from kuru. But among women and children who periodically participate in cannibalistic rituals, the disease is very common. From this it followed that one of the ways of infection is by eating infected meat.

A new step in the study of the mysterious infection was made when the doctor sent tissue samples taken from another victim to his colleague. Then it became clear that kuru is an analogue of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The brain of a person who has suffered one of these ailments is covered with “vacuoles” (voids), giving it a sponge-like appearance.

Another parallel was drawn with scrapie, a disease that affects sheep and has similar consequences. This is how a new type of disease appeared – prion diseases.

For demonstrating the similarity of all three diseases, Gaidushek was awarded the Nobel Prize. This saved the Fore tribe from complete extinction. The Papuans simply abandoned cannibalism. It would seem that the deal is in the bag... but life threw an unpleasant surprise...

Suddenly, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, previously seen only in older people, began to affect young people. For a long time, doctors could not understand what was wrong. Actually, they didn’t understand much before – the cause of the disease was unknown...

The epidemic continued to develop until it was noticed that all young people affected by the disease were undergoing a special course of treatment to increase their height. The fact is that by the early 60s, scientists isolated growth hormone in the pituitary gland and learned to implant it in children. Naturally, the only source of the hormone was the brain of the dead. Among the donors were also carriers of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

As already mentioned, prion diseases have a long incubation period. Therefore, by the time doctors recognized the epidemic, “growth hormone” had been administered to 27 thousand children!

Now let's do some math. The project was stopped in 1984. The incubation period reaches 20 years. Thus, the dire consequences are just beginning to appear.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a progressive, inevitably fatal disease that is accompanied by muscle cramps and decreased intellectual function.
further building -("big post"), p.e.:

CJD is a fatal disease

Here is a description of Jacob's patients:
"In the early stages of the disease, the patients had impaired sensitivity and pain in the arms and legs. Then these complaints were accompanied by signs of visual impairment, and later convulsions appeared. The patients suffered greatly from fast, irregular, constantly renewed short contractions of individual muscles, including .ch. and facial expressions, sometimes accompanied by a smile, similar to that which appears in patients with tetanus (risus sardonicus).
They lost coordination of movements, speech and swallowing were impaired. In parallel with these symptoms, signs of progressive dementia developed, expressed in more and more obvious disorders of thinking, impoverishment of emotional activity, decrease and, finally, complete loss of criticism.
Eventually, the patients fell into an unconscious state, lost the ability to move, and as a result of respiratory and cardiac disorders, death occurred."

Countries with human cases are marked in dark green.
light green - cases of mad cow disease.
------
Kuru - "laughing death"
The Fore people were dying from a strange disease. They suddenly began to shake with inexplicable trembling. There was no pain, but the trembling became stronger every week. At the same time, they were overcome by uncontrollable laughter.
The trembling did not allow them to stand on their feet, but the laughter did not stop. They could no longer sit, they could not hold their heads - the laughter would not let them go. Death occurred no later than nine months later.

They called the terrible disease “KURA”.

The world learned about the “laughing death” of the Fore tribe in March 1957.
33-year-old American doctor of Slovak-Hungarian origin Carlton Gaidushek was the first to encounter an amazing disease.
During this period, for the second year he was on assignment from the Washington Military Medical Institute on a scientific trip, collecting blood tests and data on infectious diseases in many countries around the world. And so he ends up in the town of Vainantu, on the eastern plateau New Guinea.

Kuru - "laughing death"

Scrapie. Mysterious disease

This message leads Gaidushek to a new trail. Scrapie is incurable. Animals who fell ill with a strange disease suddenly began to stagger, suffered from unbearable itching, due to which they licked their fur to the base, they lost the ability to swallow and died in the same way as those who fell ill with kuru.
While studying scrapie, scientists discovered a paradoxical phenomenon: antibodies typical of infectious diseases were not observed in the blood of sick animals.
The electron microscope did not detect any pathogen. But when researchers injected brain matter from the diseased animal into a healthy sheep, it also developed scrapie.

The infection manifested itself with a delay, which has not yet been observed in any disease. The first symptoms of the disease were discovered only a year later.
If such a delayed infection exists in sheep, then why couldn't humans be susceptible to it? Is there an analogy between kuru and scrapie?

Kuru - the disease of cannibals

Gajdushek injects an extract of the brains of Aboriginal people who died from kuru to two chimpanzees.
Months pass. The monkeys look healthy and feel very well. And only almost 2 years after the injection, one of the monkeys suddenly began to tremble, followed by the other. This is kuru.

Of course, a new infectious disease has been discovered that does not have the usual infectious signs. Pathogens that seemed absent at first glance actually existed. With simple skin contact they do not pose a danger.
Infection occurs only when the pathogen is directly introduced into the brain or blood. How did the New Guinea Fore become infected?
It turned out that the Fore tribe are cannibals...

Kuru disease is a typical example of human vector-borne prion diseases.
It is found only among the inhabitants of the mountainous Okapa and Fores tribes (Papua New Guinea islands), distinguished by closely related ties, among whom until recently there was a ritual of cannibalism.
The disease is believed to have started spontaneously in one member of the tribe as a case of sporadic disease Creutzfeld - Jacob, and then was transmitted transmissively to other members of the tribe in connection with ritual cannibalism (residents of these tribes ate the insufficiently heat-treated brain of deceased fellow tribesmen).

More than 2,500 people died (about 200 per year). The incidence virtually ceased with the abolition of ritual cannibalism.
However, isolated cases still appear because the incubation period can last more than 30 years.

The researcher finally took the right path. This is evidenced by the following fact: the cannibal Fore tribe, starting in the late 50s, introduced normal burial into use. The “laughing death” also retreated. In the near future they will no longer even think about it.
This ends the history of the cannibal disease, but not the history of a new pathogen that the world has not yet known.

Slow viruses

Slow viruses

. This also includes Parkinson's disease- a mysterious trembling of the arms and legs, which until recently was defined as a phenomenon of disintegration of the nerve tracts of the spinal cord and brain. “Slow viruses” can also be considered causative agents of rheumatism.

How infection occurs can only be speculated for now. Since these viruses develop in the animal body in the same way as in humans, it can be assumed that human infection occurs through the ingestion of animal meat. A small wound in the mouth can be a “gateway” for the virus.
Currently, scientists do not yet know how to resist infections from “slow” viruses. The American National Institute of Health has conducted large-scale research in this direction. Laboratories in Europe and America were filled with excitement. Virologist Klaus Mannweiler, a professor at the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, called the new pathogen “the most mysterious and exciting object of medicine of our day.”
His colleague Dr John Holland, from the University of California, said: "It appears that we are looking at the tip of the iceberg; we will now suspect that the cause of all chronic and slow-onset diseases that are not yet fully understood is a new pathogen."

Interestingly, the general picture of the disease in all currently established viral infections is characterized by a sudden accelerated aging of patients.
In this regard, the researcher of “slow” viruses, Dr. Gaidushek, puts forward an assumption: “Perhaps the aging of the body is also a similar infection?..”
For his remarkable discovery, Washington Institute of Health director Dr. Carlton Gajdushek was awarded the International Nobel Prize in December 1976.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7aDpk9UYXTA

I liked a certain generalization from one of the bloggers:

"O Kuru there is an interesting game Dead Island.v 1.3.0 + 3 DLC. It is dedicated to our favorite zombie that cheerfully and cheerfully eat tourists in Bali resorts. The game, of course, is greatly spoiled by the influence of single-celled downs with inflamed insanity from multiplayer, but there are many interesting moments there.

Cannibalism of four types:

1. Medical (used only by women and therefore little known - cosmetic).

2. Exocannibalism - eating people outside the tribe (military cults of pagans, the origins of myths about vampires and werewolves).

3. Endocannibalism - ritual religious cannibalism, we know as sacrament.

4. Femiphagy - cannibalism of the future, is quite likely with the overpopulation of the planet and the development of the gay elite (femiphagy - eating women as the main culprits of the overpopulation of the Earth and, accordingly, the equalization of food issues).

In this case, the danger of the appearance of kuru is coming again..."

Femiphagy, it seems, is already being exploited with might and main in China?!. The future has arrived, yes...

imposed civilizational cannibalism, leaving no options for existence

In 1932, a previously unknown Papuan Fore tribe was discovered in the mountains of New Guinea. This became a truly priceless gift for ethnographers and anthropologists, who could now study the peculiarities of the life of primitive tribes using “living material”.

The gift, of course, is rather dubious. Because the Fore Papuans were not peaceful root gatherers or ordinary hunters - they actively practiced cannibalism.

Some of their rituals simply shocked the civilized public, especially the Christian priests who dared to approach these petty cannibals in 1949 with sermons about loving your neighbor.

Even without priests, Papuans loved their neighbors very much. True, from a gastronomic point of view. Particularly popular among these cannibals was the ritual eating of the brain of a deceased relative. Moreover, in this ritual the main participants were women and children.

The Papuans sincerely believed that by eating the brain of their deceased relative, they would acquire his intelligence, as well as other virtues. Eyewitnesses describe this ritual as follows:

“Women and girls dismember the corpses of the dead with their bare hands. Having separated the brain and muscles, they put them with their bare hands into specially prepared bamboo cylinders, which are then kept for a short time on hot stones in holes dug in the ground... A little time passes, and women and children begin to crowd around the hearths in impatient anticipation when they will finally open , the cylinders will remove the contents and the feast will begin.”

SHIRKING AND DAMAGE

One of the then mission workers once saw a little girl who was clearly sick:

“She was shaking violently, and her head was swaying spasmodically from side to side. I was told that she was a victim of witchcraft and that this trembling would continue until her death. She won't be able to eat until she dies. She should die in a few weeks."

The Fore Papuans called this terrible scourge with the word “ kuru", which in their language has two meanings - “trembling” and “damage”. And the reason for kuru is the evil eye of someone else’s sorcerer.

But if everything was solely due to the witch’s evil eye... Of course, official medicine in the person of the American doctor Carlton Gaidushek did not believe in the evil eye. Gajdushek appeared among the Fore tribe in 1957. He was the first to give a scientific description of kuru, which European doctors had never encountered before. Initially, patients lose coordination of movements and their gait becomes unstable. There is a headache, runny nose, cough, and fever.

As the disease progresses, the characteristic symptom of kuru appears - trembling of the limbs and head. In the final stages, coordination is so impaired that the person stops moving. All this lasts approximately 10-16 months and ends in death.

Some patients in the last stages experienced uncontrollable laughter or suddenly developed a crooked smile. This symptom allowed some “poets” to call chicken a “laughing” disease.

THE BRAIN IS LIKE A SPONGE

Observing doomed patients, Gaidushek suggested that this disease primarily affects the brain. An autopsy confirmed his guess: in patients with kuru, the brain degraded over several months, turning into a spongy mass. Not a single modern medicine could save the unfortunate people: neither antibiotics, nor sulfonamides, nor hormones.

The doctor was at a loss. Even tissue samples sent to America for research could not shed light. Yes, tests have shown that with kuru there is destruction of the nerve cells of the cerebellum. But why is this happening? What is the reason? Some kind of infection?

For six whole years, Gaidushek struggled with the riddle of kuru, until he accidentally saw in a scientific journal materials devoted to scrapie - an equally mysterious disease that, however, affects sheep.
Gaujdushek immediately noticed that animals with scrapie died in almost the same way as those with kuru. When researchers injected brain matter from a sick sheep into a healthy one, the latter became ill. True, after a year...

Therefore, we were talking about a delayed infection. And, after analyzing everything, Gaidushek suggested: what if kuru is also one of the similar “slow” infections?

DON'T EAT YOUR NEIGHBOR

And he turned out to be right! He did almost the same thing as his colleagues with sheep - he injected an extract of the brain of a patient who had died from kuru into two chimpanzees. The chimpanzees got sick, but not after a month, or even after three or four - the disease appeared only after two years!

Gajdushek subsequently found out that kuru did not have the usual infectious symptoms. And the pathogens are not visible. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. Gaidushek noted that this disease mainly affected women and children. And men - in very rare cases.

And the researcher made the right conclusion - cannibalism is to blame! It is women and children who participate in the ritual eating of human flesh, while men eat beans and sweet potatoes.

Infected meat is the main source of kuru infection. As soon as cannibalism was put an end to, the cases of kuru practically disappeared. Gajdushek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for his sensational research. He donated the money from the prize to the long-suffering Fore tribe.

DEADLY SLOW

According to some scientists, “slow” viruses are one of the most terrible phenomena of our reality. None of the poisons affect them. They do not die even under irradiation and ultra-high temperatures, from which all living things die.

The size of “slow” viruses is 10 times smaller than the smallest ordinary virus. These internal saboteurs behave in a special way: they undermine the body slowly and gradually, and the diseases they cause are more similar to wear and tear and self-destruction than to illness.

Nowadays, scientists do not know how to deal with insidious “slow” viruses. They can only speak with reverence of these newly discovered viruses as “the most mysterious and exciting object of medicine of our day.”

Story

The disease was described in detail in the city by the Australian doctor Zygas and the American of Slovak-Hungarian origin Carlton Gajduzek.

The word "kuru" in the Fore language has two meanings - "trembling" and "damage". Members of the Fore tribe believed that the disease was the result of an evil eye from an alien shaman.

Kuru is the most typical example of transmissible human prion diseases - spongiform encephalopathies. It was during the study of kuru that the concept of transmissible human spongiform encephalopathies was formed.

Clinic

The disease was spread through ritual cannibalism, namely eating the brain of someone with the disease. With the eradication of cannibalism, kuru practically disappeared. However, isolated cases still appear because the incubation period can last more than 30 years.

The main signs of the disease are severe trembling and jerky movements of the head, sometimes accompanied by a smile, similar to that which appears in patients with tetanus (risus sardonicus). This, however, is not a typical sign. Designation "laughing death" for kuru - on the conscience of the creators of the headlines of newspaper articles. Members of the Fore tribe never talk about illness like that.

In the initial stage, the disease manifests itself as dizziness and fatigue. Then a headache, cramps and, eventually, typical tremors are added. Over the course of several months, brain tissue degrades, turning into a spongy mass. The disease is characterized by the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the central nervous system, especially in the area of ​​the brain that controls human body movements. As a result, control of muscle movements occurs and tremors of the torso, limbs and head develop. This disease occurs mainly in women and children, and is considered incurable - after 9-12 months it ends in death.

Pathogenesis

According to modern data, kuru is a prion infection, one of the types of spongiform encephalopathy.

For his discovery of the infectious nature of the Kuru disease, Carlton Gajduzek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He donated the prize money to the Fore tribe. Gajduzek himself did not recognize the prion theory and was convinced that spongiform encephalopathy was caused by so-called slow viruses. This theory still has supporters, although they are in the minority.

The prion theory of the development of spongiform encephalopathy was developed by another American scientist, Stanley Prusiner. Stanley Prusiner), for which he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the city.

Immunity

In 2009, American scientists made an unexpected discovery: some members of the Fore tribe, thanks to a new polymorphism of the PRNP gene that appeared in them relatively recently, have innate immunity to kuru. They published the results of their research in the New England Journal of Medicine ( "The New England Journal of Medicine").

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Notes

Literature

• Vashchenko M. A., Anisimova Yu. N. Slow neuroviral infections. - Kyiv: Health, 1982. - 112 p.

Excerpt describing Kuru (disease)

Soon after this, from the partisan detachment of Dorokhov, who went to the left of Tarutin, a report was received that troops had appeared in Fominskoye, that these troops consisted of the Broussier division and that this division, separated from other troops, could easily be exterminated. The soldiers and officers again demanded action. The staff generals, excited by the memory of the ease of victory at Tarutin, insisted to Kutuzov that Dorokhov’s proposal be implemented. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive necessary. What happened was the mean, what had to happen; A small detachment was sent to Fominskoye, which was supposed to attack Brusier.
By a strange coincidence, this appointment - the most difficult and most important, as it turned out later - was received by Dokhturov; that same modest, little Dokhturov, whom no one described to us as drawing up battle plans, flying in front of regiments, throwing crosses at batteries, etc., who was considered and called indecisive and uninsightful, but the same Dokhturov, whom during all Russian wars with the French, from Austerlitz until the thirteenth year, we find ourselves in charge wherever the situation is difficult. In Austerlitz, he remains the last at the Augest dam, gathering regiments, saving what he can, when everything is running and dying and not a single general is in the rearguard. He, sick with a fever, goes to Smolensk with twenty thousand to defend the city against the entire Napoleonic army. In Smolensk, as soon as he dozed off at the Molokhov Gate, in a paroxysm of fever, he was awakened by cannonade across Smolensk, and Smolensk held out all day. On Borodino Day, when Bagration was killed and the troops of our left flank were killed in a ratio of 9 to 1 and the entire force of the French artillery was sent there, no one else was sent, namely the indecisive and indiscernible Dokhturov, and Kutuzov hurries to correct his mistake when he sent there another. And small, quiet Dokhturov goes there, and Borodino is the best glory of the Russian army. And many heroes are described to us in poetry and prose, but almost not a word about Dokhturov.
Again Dokhturov is sent there to Fominskoye and from there to Maly Yaroslavets, to the place where the last battle with the French took place, and to the place from which, obviously, the death of the French already begins, and again many geniuses and heroes are described to us during this period of the campaign , but not a word about Dokhturov, or very little, or doubtful. This silence about Dokhturov most obviously proves his merits.
Naturally, for a person who does not understand the movement of a machine, when he sees its action, it seems that the most important part of this machine is that chip that accidentally fell into it and, interfering with its progress, flutters in it. A person who does not know the structure of the machine cannot understand that it is not this splinter that spoils and interferes with the work, but that small transmission gear that silently turns, is one of the most essential parts of the machine.
On October 10, the same day that Dokhturov walked half the road to Fominsky and stopped in the village of Aristov, preparing to exactly carry out the given order, the entire French army, in its convulsive movement, reached Murat’s position, as it seemed, in order to give The battle suddenly, for no reason, turned left onto the new Kaluga road and began to enter Fominskoye, in which Brusier had previously stood alone. Dokhturov at that time had under his command, in addition to Dorokhov, two small detachments of Figner and Seslavin.
On the evening of October 11, Seslavin arrived in Aristovo to his superiors with a captured French guardsman. The prisoner said that the troops that had entered Fominskoe today constituted the vanguard of the entire large army, that Napoleon was right there, that the entire army had already left Moscow for the fifth day. That same evening, a servant who came from Borovsk told how he saw a huge army entering the city. Cossacks from Dorokhov's detachment reported that they saw the French Guard walking along the road to Borovsk. From all this news it became obvious that where they thought they would find one division, there was now the entire French army, marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction - along the old Kaluga road. Dokhturov did not want to do anything, since it was not clear to him now what his responsibility was. He was ordered to attack Fominskoye. But in Fominskoe there had previously only been Broussier, now there was the entire French army. Ermolov wanted to act at his own discretion, but Dokhturov insisted that he needed to have an order from His Serene Highness. It was decided to send a report to headquarters.

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Kuru disease

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Publication date: January 29, 2013

    

Kuru is a disease of the nervous system.

Causes

Kuru is a very rare disease. Kuru is caused by an infectious protein (prion) in human brain tissue. Kuru occurs more commonly among the people of New Guinea, who practiced cannibalism in a form where they eat the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. This practice stopped in 1960, but cases of kuru were reported for many years later because the disease has a long incubation period. Kuru causes changes in the brain and nervous system similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Similar diseases appear in cows, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease. The main risk factor for kuru is the consumption of human brain tissue, which may contain infectious particles.

Symptoms

Symptoms of kuru include:

• Pain in the arm and legs
• Coordination problems that become serious
• Difficulty walking (cerebellar ataxia)
• Headache
• Difficulty swallowing
• Muscle jerking (myoclonus)

Difficulty swallowing can lead to malnutrition or hunger. The average incubation period is 10 to 13 years; an incubation period of 30 years or more has not been reported. Neurological examination may show changes in coordination and walking ability.

Treatment

There is no known cure for kuru disease.

Prospects

Death usually occurs within 1 year of the first symptoms.