According to the rash of radio, magazine, and newspaper accounts that followed the discovery of kuru by Western researchers in the 1950s, some of the earliest and most unsettling symptoms of the disease were intermittent bouts of uncontrolled laughter, or what researchers referred to as pathological laughter. But if the symptoms of kuru were disturbing to the mid-20th-century public, the way the disease was said to spread was even worse, for according to those working to unlock the lethal mystery, kuru was spread by cannibalism.
In the early 1950s, anthropologists and medical researchers began arriving at one of the wildest and most primitive regions on the planet. New Guinea, the world’s second largest island, rises from the western Pacific like a dinosaur with a mountainous spinal column. Upon their arrival, the scientists saw no roads and nothing much that resembled their concept of a city or even a town. Instead they found themselves crossing parasite-ridden mangrove swamps and rainforests whose primary inhabitants seemed to be biting insects, terrestrial leeches, and venomous snakes. But even after reaching their destination in the foreboding Eastern Highlands, conditions were no less dangerous, for the researchers had come to study New Guinea’s infamous cannibals.
Numbering approximately 36,000 individuals in the mid-20th century, the Fore (pronounced FOR-ay) spoke three distinct dialects and inhabited some 170 villages situated among New Guinea’s lush mountain valleys. Desiring (and having) little or no contact with the outside world, the Fore practiced the same slash-and-burn agriculture that had sustained them for thousands of years. Currently what made them especially interesting to the researchers was not their lack of contact with the modern world, their farming techniques, or even the reports that they practiced ritual cannibalism. It was the fact that something was killing them—horribly and at an alarmingly rapid rate.
A decade earlier, as post-WWII colonialism extended its reach onto the “primitive” Pacific islands, Australian patrol officers in New Guinea began encountering some of the most isolated of the island’s inhabitants.46 Like the missionaries that had arrived, preached, and often disappeared for their troubles, the Australian officials (whom the Fore called kiaps) encouraged the locals to curtail what they considered some unacceptably bad behavior. Sorcery and tribal warfare, the Aussie officials said, were prohibited. The Fore were also requested to please stop eating each other, which they claimed to do as a way of honoring their dead. Grudgingly, the indigenous people soon agreed to the requests, although today many anthropologists believe that, while most of them complied, others simply concealed their long-held rituals whenever the nosy white people came around.
Unfortunately, many of the Fore were experiencing problems far more serious than the arrival of their pushy new friends. In fact the kiaps were reporting that something akin to a plague was taking place, one that primarily took its toll on women and children. In addition to the uncontrollable laughter, victims experienced tremors, muscle jerks, and coordination problems that gradually gave way to an inability to swallow, and finally, complete loss of bodily control. The Fore responded to their stricken relatives with kindness—feeding, moving, and cleaning them when they could no longer care for themselves. Invariably, though, their loved ones died, all of them—of starvation, thirst, or pneumonia, their bodies covered in bedsores. The mystery disease was killing approximately 1 percent of the population each year.
Fore elders told the foreigners that the sickness resulted from a form of sorcery. The kiaps were informed that the process went something like this: Sorcerers would stealthily obtain an item connected to their intended victim, like feces, hair, or discarded food. After wrapping the object in leaves, they would place it in a swampy area where it couldn’t be found. As the sorcery bundle began to decompose, so, too, the Fore said, would the victim. The elders also told the kiaps that the condition could not be cured or even treated, and they tried to explain that preventing this sort of thing was the main reason they sometimes killed each another. The patrol officers took it all down, and although some of them were quite sympathetic, they drew the line at allowing the Fore to resume the killing of suspected sorcerers. These unfortunates were generally men or boys accused without evidence (usually several days after someone in their own village had died of kuru), then hacked, stoned, or bludgeoned to death in a form of ritual murder known as tukabu.