The Fore live in the Okapa District of the Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. There are approximately 20,000 Fore who are separated by the Wanevinti Mountains into the North Fore and South Fore regions. Their main form of survival is swidden horticulture. The Fore language has three distinct dialects and is the southernmost member of the East Central Family, East New Guinea Highlands Stock, Trans-New Guinea phylum of Papuan languages. ^[1]

In the early 1900s the prion disease Kuru (also known as laughing sickness due to the outbursts of laughter that mark its second phase) was discovered in the South Fore, a subgroup of around 8000 people living in the Okapa subdistrict (Eastern Highlands Province). The well-known case of ritual acts of mortuary cannibalism of the Fore resulted in the spread of the disease. Kuru is well documented and not seriously questioned by modern anthropologists.

Kuru among the South Fore

Upon the death of an individual, the maternal kin were responsible for the dismemberment of the corpse. The women would remove the arms and feet, strip the limbs of muscle, remove the brain and cut open the chest in order to remove internal organs.

Shirley Lindenbaum, one of the early kuru researchers, states that kuru victims were highly regarded as sources of food, because the layer of fat on victims who died quickly resembled pork. Women also were known to feed morsels - such as human brain and various parts of organs - to their children and the elderly (Lindenbaum, 1979).

It is currently believed that kuru was transmitted among the South Fore through participation in such cannibalism, although opportunistic infection through wounds when removing infectious tissue from the corpse can be assumed to be another cause, as not all cases can be explained by ingestion of infectious tissue.

Though the Fore would not eat those who had apparently died of disease, and so did not so easily catch other diseases via cannibalism, they believed that kuru was a mental affliction caused by a curse rather than a physical disease.

The kuru epidemic reached its height in the 1960s. Between 1957 and 1968, over 1100 of the South Fore died from kuru. The vast majority of victims among the South Fore were women. In fact, eight times more women than men contracted the disease. It later affected small children and the elderly at a high rate as well.

Lindenbaum and Vincent Zigas worked among the South Fore in New Guinea trying to identify and catalog the symptoms and possible behavior causing the disease. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek also traveled there in 1957, to study disease patterns in indigenous and isolated populations (Gajdusek, 1996). Lindenbaum, Zigas, and Gajdusek were all crucial to explaining the specifics of kuru to the rest of the world.

The disease all but disappeared with the termination of cannibalism in New Guinea.

References

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