Re:Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
by Y_Y on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:32AM
(#27062223)
Did you read about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel by any chance?
Re:Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
by todd8 on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:54AM
(#27064139)
I do have the book, it's quite interesting, but I read about Kuru while it was still thought to be caused by an infectious virus. My recollection is a bit vague, but I believe it was in Time or Newsweek during the 1960s.
It was a scary sounding disease so I remembered it when years later it was discovered to be caused by prions and reported in The New York Times.
Well a prion disease (called Kuru) did affect the Fore people of New Guinea seriously in the 1950s and 1960s as I recall. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Fore people:
> Furthermore, Kuru predominantly affected women, as women more commonly partook in cannibalistic religious rituals. Because of this, there was a significant sex imbalance in Fore society.[14] By some accounts, this gender imbalance reached a 3:1 male to female ratio at its worst. This affected the family structure of the Fore, as it became commonplace for children to be raised and cared for only by their fathers.[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore_people