• RegularJoe@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

    Kuru is a rare, incurable, and fatal neurodegenerative disorder that was formerly common among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. It is a prion disease which leads to tremors and loss of coordination from neurodegeneration. The term kúru means “trembling” and comes from the Fore word kuria or guria (“to shake”).[3][4] It is also known as “laughing sickness” due to abnormal bursts of laughter from the patients.

    It was spread among the Fore people via funerary cannibalism.

    Mad cow for people.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      18 hours ago

      I knew about Kuru but I didn’t know this:

      Usual onset 5 to 50 years after initial exposure

      That makes it even worse. Pretty hard to diagnose wtf is happening if it can take half a century to hit. Imagine you’re just eating some brains as a healthy 15 year old and then boom, kuru 20 years later. You barely got to be an adult and you’re dying because of… Nothing! Nobody knows!

        • Gal@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          It was a prion disease that was only contracted in the Fore people. The only way to get it was to be born with it or eat someone with the disease. So once people there stopped cannibalism, the disease began to disappear.

        • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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          21 hours ago

          I think it is something that happens naturally every so often, and eating brains is a trigger for it if not the only one. Like cows will naturally get mad cow disease every so often naturally or something like that it might be different than the spread stuff.

          • justaman123@lemmy.world
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            18 hours ago

            Yeah it’s just a protein growing weird and then it replicates and messes everything up. And if you eat the weird protein your body is like oh yeah I guess I can make proteins like this oh whoops guess this causes a problem