An annotated history of kuru

This version of the history of kuru research departs from many earlier accounts, including my own, which often cling to a particular sequence of research and publication. The story usually begins in the early 1950s when several patrol officers and two anthropologists working in New Guinea reported the disease.1 It then unfolds with the first medical assessment in 1957, the anthropological investigations that began in 1961, and the mix of anthropological and medical research that unraveled the case in the 1960s. The narrative reaches a high point with the report of two Nobel Prizes in Medicine: one to Carleton Gajdusek in 1976, for transmitting the infection to laboratory primates, and the other to Stanley Prusiner in 1997, for identifying the nature of the infectious agent. It soon becomes clear that no one born since 1960 (when cannibalism ended) had come down with the disease, confirming the hypothesis that consuming the dead was the mode of transmission. The last case of kuru in 2009 then brings an end to the epidemic that once threatened the survival of the Fore people. The lessons learned during the epidemic are directed now at cultural and medical issues associated with diagnosis and care for patients with all forms of prion disease, and for the promotion of public and animal health worldwide.