Kuru
Diseases

"There they (Japanese) experimented upon the Fore Indian tribe and inoculated them with a minced-up version of the brains of diseased sheep containing the visna virus which causes "mad cow disease" or Creutzfeldt—Jakob disease......About five or six years later, after the Japanese had been driven out, the poor people of the Fore tribe developed what they called kuru, which was their word for "wasting", and they began to shake, lose their appetites and die. The autopsies revealed that their brains had literally turned to mush. They had contracted "mad cow disease" from the Japanese experiments.......In 1957, when the disease was beginning to blossom in full among the Fore people, Dr Carleton Gajdusek of the US National Institutes of Health headed to New Guinea to determine how the minced-up brains of the visna-infected sheep affected them. He spent a couple of years there, studying the Fore people, and wrote an extensive report. He won the Nobel Prize for "discovering" kuru disease in the Fore tribe."--Donald Scott

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