BY KEITH JACKSON

PNG ATTITUDE frequently receives communications from researchers, authors and other seekers of information who are pondering this question or that and wondering if people can help.

It probably won’t surprise you that - our readers being a pretty savvy lot - more often than not the searcher for wisdom is provided with facts, anecdotes, references and further referrals – and moves on replete with new learning and new contacts.

Information sourcing has become a distinct if lesser recognised benefit of this website.

Recently, biologist Dr Douglas Allchin of the University of Minnesota in the USA sought information on the history of kuru and the work of controversial Nobel prize winning scientist Carleton Gajdusek, whose research into kuru led to important insights into brain disease.

I put Doug, who is developing a case study on kuru for use in science classes, in touch with Des Martin, and I thought you might like to eavesdrop on the conversation….

DES WROTE:

I served as a Patrol Officer/District Officer in PNG for some twenty years post WW2 where I had served in the Australian army fighting against the Japs. Most of my time was on outstations and I belong to that band of PNG Patrol Officer brothers of my vintage who on occasions faced spears an arrows. A bygone era that was virtually unknown in Australia let alone the USA. I also served in a diplomatic post in Washington DC in the late 70's and early 80's and still retain an interest in the American scene and news.

Cannibalism was not endemic throughout PNG and where it occurred it took various forms. In the upper Sepik River area it was traditional to eat all your enemies and a typical case in the early 50's was where people from an area called Yellow River invited a mixed group of about thirty from the nearby May River area to visit and promptly killed and ate them all.

In other areas it was more of the ritual kind, e.g. eat parts of your enemy in order to gain his strength. In the swampy areas of the lands bordering on the Sepik River delta it was traditional to partake of your clan relatives when they died.

Patrol Officers like me working in the districts recently under government control and our superiors were consciously aware of cannibalism as a way of life in some districts but it was more of interest as an exotic sphere of research or whatever to anthropologists seeking a PhD. We normally never highlighted the practice in our routine reports. It was a local fact of life.

Jack Baker who was the PO in the area was probably aware that Kuru (laughing disease) was caused by the ritual eating of brain matter without of course understanding the physiology of what caused the resultant disease The then district medical officer Dr Vin Zegas reports on the disease came to the notice of Gadjusek who came to PNG and made the first serious medical study of Kuru. A Dr Alpers later came into the picture but it was Jack Baker and Vin Zigas who first surfaced the matter but never got the recognition afforded to Gadjusek and Alpers.

DOUG RESPONDED:

I am aware that the Fore form of ritual cannibalism of dead relatives was in some ways quite different from other PNG cultures. The challenge of interpreting kuru was that although it was transmitted from one individual to another, it did not affect its victim immediately, but lingered between 4 and 40 years before becoming active. There is no immune response (as there is for bacterial or virus infections) -- and that would puzzle physicians such as Gajdusek and Zigas. So they did not immediately "see" or conclude that the consumption of dead relatives among the Fore was responsible for spreading the disease. The cannibalism was based on kinship, so kuru appeared in families, indicating it was perhaps genetic.

It is widely appreciated now that Zigas and Gajdusek coauthored the initial scientific papers that brought kuru to international attention, but it was Gajdusek (and Alpers) who had the ambition (and resources!) to do the lengthy and tedious experiments that later indicated the disease could be transmitted by inoculations of contaminated brain matter.

To this we may also add the work of anthropologists Robert and Shirley  Glass and PNG medical officer John Matthews, who helped to demonstrate the role of the ritual cannibalism. And veterinarian William Hadlow, who linked kuru to scrapie in sheep.And, as highlighted in the conference in London in 2007, many of the Fore people contributed as assistants -- in securing tissue samples, in helping with autopsies, in surveying the distribution of the disease. Science is certainly a wide collaborative enterprise and we hope our case study for science classrooms helps to convey that.

Although the cannibalism stopped by 1960, the last known case of kuru emerged in 2006.