SOME diseases are so devastating that survival is virtually impossible – with fatality rates hitting 100 per cent. Thankfully, due to modern medicine, they’re incredibly rare. The few that ...

But it was the discovery of kuru, ravaging the Fore tribes of Papua ... supervised the complex logistics of acquiring fresh-frozen brain autopsy samples in the Papuan jungle, shipping them to ...

Kuru, a rare and fatal brain disorder, was at epidemic levels from the 1950s through the 1960s among the Fore people in the highlands of New Guinea because of their practice of ritualistic ...

Kuru is a transmissible encephalopathy caused by prions. A prion is an abnormal, misfolded form of a normal cellular protein in the brain. Abnormally folded proteins tend to induce misfolding in ...