Talk:Kuru (disease)

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

why cannibalism
I think the article should make some mention of why the South Fore practice(d) cannibalism. My recollection is that upland New Guinea had few indigenous sources of protein, forcing those living there to resort to such measures. I think they incorporated it into their culture, and that one ate ones relatives (although I'm not so sure about this last bit). Equally, the article says kuru "all but disappeared with the termination of cannibalism in New Guinea" - I imagine that once the cause was determined, some program of health education was undertaken (by whom?) which caused said termination. So, in summary, the article should say why the South Fore did it, and why they stopped doing it (maybe only a sentence for each would be sufficient - I realise this is an article about the disease, not a treatise of cultural anthropology). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:35, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Cannibalism stopped when it was made illegal in 1957. The people didn't put up much resistance to the ban, I think because the practice of eating the dead hadn't been going on in their culture for all that long, so it wasn't really a big deal for them to abandon it. Kuru didn't stop with the ban, there are still occasional cases today due to the huge incubation periods. The Fore people also still don't believe in infectious agents - they are convinced kuru was some kind of supernatural punishment or curse. As to why they started practising cannibalism in the first place, having spoken to some people who've been out there I get the impression it was partly because a neighbouring tribe pointed out it was a good source of much needed protein, and partly because they thought it was kind of rude to chuck your relatives in a pit to rot. It became part of the funerary rituals. I will put some of this in when I get round to it! -- Purple 17:28, 22 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Was there a famine at the time they started, that they needed a good source of protein? Plus, what about this neigbouring tribe. Were they affected by Kuru? They must have already practiced it if they were the ones to show it to the South Fore. 24.84.35.186 20:12, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

From what I've been reading in "Guns, Germs, and Steel," the climate of the New Guinean highlands doesn't have any natural sources of protein. There are no large animals in the region that can be eaten. Additionally, high protein crops like wheat and barley won't grow there, and the highlands have little access to oceans and streams, which means no fish either. Protein deficiency was endemic there for hundreds of years, leading to cannibalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.82.87 (talk) 07:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
 * http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article3215917.ece
 * Looks like the men escaped because they invented a reason not to eat dead people. The RS lecture should be citeable. It is not impossible that the women were encouraged to become cannibals because they would be "distasteful" to other tribes and less likely to be stolen (see various tatooing and mutilation rituals). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.177.22.199 (talk) 22:20, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
 * There is a very serious error here. THE MEN ATE THE CHOICE PARTS OF THE DEAD HUMAN...the women and children got what was left. There is obviously an attempt here to cover up the extreme mysogyny practiced by the males of the fore tribe. oldcitycat (talk) 00:39, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I checked my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I couldn't find anywhere that Jared Diamond mention why the cannibalism started among the Foré, so any inferences from that would apparently be prohibited original research. The Times article link above is broken, and content there is behind a paywall. Fortunately, I found a passage in Dueling Neurosurgeons that gives an explanation from anthropologists, so I'll add that to the article. -- Beland (talk) 01:52, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

distinct from CJD?
Is this actually a distinct disease from Creutzfeldt-Jakob_disease? It seems like maybe the articles should be merged but maybe these are different rather than two different names for the same disease. Kit 05:08:49, 2005-08-09 (UTC)


 * They are most certainly distinct. CJD is inherited, and vCJD is CJD from consuming beef. Kuru is a prion disease due to cannibalism, although its persistence is unexplained. Okay, the mechanism is similar, but to merge this with CJD would lead to loss of a vital distinction. JFW | T@lk  16:59, 9 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, thanks for clarifying. Kit 20:29:06, 2005-08-09 (UTC)


 * Purple, what do you mean by the "persistence of the Kuru prion"? 24.84.35.186 20:09, 16 July 2006 (UTC)


 * According to the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Creutzfeld-Jakob Fact Sheet, there are three major categories of CJD:
 * In sporadic CJD, the disease appears even though the person has no known risk factors for the disease. This is by far the most common type of CJD and accounts for at least 85 percent of cases.
 * In hereditary CJD, the person has a family history of the disease and/or tests positive for a genetic mutation associated with CJD. About 5 to 10 percent of cases of CJD in the United States are hereditary.
 * In iatrogenic or acquired CJD, the disease is transmitted by exposure to brain or nervous system tissue, or extracts from such tissue such as human growth hormone made from cadaver pituitary glands (human growth hormone is now exclusively made from bacteria with recombinant DNA coding for that hormone and cannot cause CJD). Now, the only remaining routes of transmission for this disease are transplants of nerve tissue such as cornea or dura mater, or reuse of surgical instruments after use in neurosurgery on CJD patients. Fewer than 1 percent of CJD cases have been acquired through medical treatment.
 * A fourth type, variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, is thought to be caused by eating food infected with prions (such as the ones which are thought to have cause the outbreak of "mad cow disease" or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy originating in Great Britain).


 * The existence of acquired and variant CJD raises in some researchers' minds the issue of whether or not the causative agent of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease goes from mother to child by vertical transmission, with emphasis on the variant form of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease commonly thought to have spread from human consumption of meat from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. A recent study of 125 children of parents with variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease shows no evidence of transmission in this way, but the study's authors emphasize that it may take an unusually long time for the disease to cause symptoms transmitted in this way.  Since familial Creutzfeld-Jakob disease occurs mainly in middle-aged to elderly people, if vertical transmission of the variant form of CJD occurs, it's not unreasonable to ask if the older form of CJD spreads in this manner, too.


 * Finally, prion resistance is known to be genetically inherited, so it may simply be that familial CJD is not itself caused by a gene, but the result of an unusual susceptibility to infection by the prion which causes Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.


 * So, to answer your question, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and kuru are thought to result from infection by different kinds of prion, but can both be spread through meat infected with prions which cause those diseases. In fact, kuru was discovered to be transmissible from organism to organism by researchers at the National Institutes of Health who injected healthy chimpanzees with homogenized brain tissue from Fore people who died of kuru, in much the same way acquired/iatrogenic CJD has been transmitted during neurosurgery by contaminated surgical instruments or transplants of brain or nerve tissue from bodies of CJD victims.


 * As far as 'persistence of the kuru prion,' prions are in general resistant to almost every known disinfectant technique used in hospitals, laboratories, and pharmaceutical plants. They can survive radiation dosage capable of destroying all but a few kinds of viruses. This is one reason for acquired/iatrogenic CJD - it wasn't known at the time most of these cases occurred that CJD could be spread from patient to patient, and that it was caused by an agent that could be steam autoclaved, immersed in formalin and sterilized in other ways thought to kill most viruses and bacteria. loupgarous (talk) 04:23, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

The distinction is now made at Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and the intro explains this is a type of that. The intro also claims that Kuru started when one person developed CJD, which contradicts the detailed facts documented in TSE. Given the citation is to a non-medical source, I'm going to remove that from the intro and contact NPR to suggest a correction to that article and ask for clarification. -- Beland (talk) 00:00, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Actually, I found a scientific source which says that may have in fact been the origin. -- Beland (talk) 00:45, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Kuru and prions
I'm not sure if this is the right place to put my question, but I'm doing a research project on the Kuru disease and I'd like to know what exactly prions do that cause the brain to get "spongy".

Now, from reading the Prion article in Wikipedia, I get that the PrP^Sc protein contains a lot more of the amino acid structure called "beta sheets" than the normal PrP^C proteins. Now assuming that HuPrP^Sc kuru protein is somewhat related to the PrP^Sc protein, these "beta sheets" allow the proteins to form insoluble fibrils called amyloid aggregations. How do these fibres cause problems? I'm only a grade 10 student, so I'd like a somewhat simplified answer so that I can understand what you are saying without having to research every word I don't understand. :)

I'd also like to know what exactly amyloid aggregations are. From what I can understand so far, they are structures formed by the prions that cause a heck of a lot of problems. Would I be correct? The article on amyloids in Wikipedia tells me that they are responsible for many neurodegenerative diseases, but it doesn't tell me how the amyloid aggregations cause the problems. Doing some more research on Wikipedia, I found that amyloid aggregations cause problems in people with Alzheimers by braking down blood vessels. Does the same sort of thing happen in Kuru?

I would really appreciate your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.35.186 (talk • contribs) 16:01, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Proteins have four levels (primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary) of structure. The two most important characteristics of secondary protein structure are alpha-helixes and beta-pleated sheets. A prion is a protein that is somehow misformed (I'm not sure if this malformation has anything to do with beta-pleated sheets or not), and this misformation makes the protein nonfunctional. Through a still unclear mechanism, prions can transmit their structural mistakes to normally structured proteins. The malformation spreads through the proteins of a normal brain after the prions are ingested, and more and more proteins become converted to prions and become nonfunctional. Proteins that don't work will obviously impede cellular functions and cause cell death, destroying brain tissue and creating a "spongy" texture. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.82.87 (talk) 07:22, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I de-jargoned Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy to help clarify for future readers. -- Beland (talk) 01:12, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Unclear sentence - Typo?
I am not sure what the author meant to write at the beginning of paragraph three of the 'History' section, but it is clearly mis-typed in some way. Can anyone correct it? -

"It was not by the time that the Kuru disease had spread into an epidemic when Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist, and Vincent Zigas, a medical doctor, first started doing research on the disease in 1957."

Suspicion falls immediately upon the word 'not' towards the beginning...

KurtHLarson (talk) 08:50, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This has since been fixed. -- Beland (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Last patient
Two sources say the final Kuru patient died in 2005, while two other sources say 2009. Rather than just delete one of the two claims (since the 2009 date cites later sources, it's more tempting as a likely correct date, but one of those two sources is Esquire of all things, so...), I acknowledged sources disagree rather than let two different claims stand in the article. If someone with medical journal access and more specific expertise in this field than I possess can clear it up, that'd be great. Grandpallama (talk) 20:38, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Transmission to men and women - or women and children only?
I checked the reference for:

"Because the brain is the organ enriched in the infectious agent prion, women and children, who consumed brain and viscera, had much higher likelihood of being infected than men, who preferentially consumed muscles.[14]" [MY BOLD]

I can't see anything there about men preferring to consume muscles.

Bill Schutt in Eat Me (p191 - 192) reports Whitfield as suggesting that pretty much only women and children ate from the deceased corpse, eating all of it, with the genitals and intestines reserved for the widow.
 * I found a reference which clarifies that adult men don't participate in the cannibalistic funeral ritual. They tend to get more desirable pig meat. -- Beland (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Homoeopathic remedies
In the history section there was a phrase stating the Fore people attempted to feed the infected pork and casuarina bark to cure kuru. I added a citation for the claim of the casuarina bark, but I couldn't find any information about the pork. I even found an article claiming that "Pigs are not really plentiful," in the region. Does anyone have a source for that claim? I removed it, but if someone can find a good source, I can add it back.Herravondure (talk) 16:17, 6 May 2022 (UTC) doi for casuarina claim: 10.3390/v11030232 doi for quotation: 10.1525/aa.1982.84.3.02a00060

Eradication status
Kuru has been removed from Eradication of infectious diseases unless someone cites sources from WHO or similar it shouldn't be stated otherwise. Watch Atlas791 (talk) 01:25, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I edited that article to note eradication of kuru in the "under way" section, copying references from this article that note the last known patients and the long incubation period, which is perhaps why I couldn't find a declaration of eradication. -- Beland (talk) 00:29, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

In popular culture section
wrote in this edit summary: "I don't see why this section was removed entirely, if someone could provide a reason that'd be nice, I was just wondering."
 * Hello! I removed this section because none of the items in it seem to pass the notability standard at MOS:POPCULT. -- Beland (talk) 23:37, 10 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Ah! Okay! Thank you! Roxxas33 (talk) 14:35, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

This section has been re-added, though without addressing the reasons for its original removal. I think it's a pretty interesting subject personally, but the only sources I've been able to find remotely close are just discussing cannibalism in film and briefly mention kuru (not as something that occurs in the films as much as a bit of trivia about the practice of cannibalism in the real world). I'm going to remove the section again but if anybody can find any relevant sources to justify inclusion I'd be all for it! Chaste Krassley (talk) 23:25, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Plagues and People
— Assignment last updated by Mbl5581 (talk) 18:34, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Pop culture sections edits
Hey @Chaste Krassley & the IP user, We were close to 3RR with the pop culture section, so I went through and removed everything that didn't meet MOS:POPCULT (reliable sources, article covers its impact on pop culture, etc.). I also removed the maintenance template. It's not perfect, and I do think more information needs to be added and/or the entire section needs to be written in prose per MOS. Have a great day! JuxtaposedJacob (talk) 21:53, 30 January 2024 (UTC)


 * more info on each piece of media, because if that cannot be found, then it's probably better to focus on the pieces of media that substantially focus on the disease. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) 21:55, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks @JuxtaposedJacob - though I'm not sure I agree that the ones listed meet MOS:POPCULT. The sources there are just synopsise the plot (or in the case of the scrubs episode and the poem, are just the text itself), and the source for The Road doesn't actually mention or refer to kuru in the context of the text at all. The closest would seem to be the ones for the X-Files episode and We Are What We Are since these actually have separate sources, but they seem to be pretty textbook what not to do from my reading of the MOS. I'm going to see if I can find anything accessible through my local libraries that touches on this to justify keeping/rewriting the section but given the lack of web sources I think it's unlikely I'll have much success. Chaste Krassley (talk) 01:36, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I tried to include as much as possible, and I thank you for your attempts, but I can't imagine that it would be better to keep my admittedly poor references in the article than delete the section entirely, if that's what it comes to.
 * Have a nice day!
 * Sincerely,
 * JuxtaposedJacob (talk) 01:42, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

"Kuru (disease" listed at Redirects for discussion
The redirect [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kuru_(disease&redirect=no Kuru (disease] has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached. Utopes (talk / cont) 01:50, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Etymology

 * The term kuru derives from the Fore word kuria or guria ("to shake")

I know the word guria as Tok Pisin. Wiktionary says it's from Tolai, which is an Austronesian language. Fore is a Trans-New Guinea language. Wiktionary says kuru is from Fore kúru, but there is no /r/ phoneme in Fore. I'm guessing it's actually kútu, with /t/ pronounced as [ɾ]. What's the correct etymology? phma (talk) 05:59, 1 July 2024 (UTC)