Medical Biology - Theses

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    Kuru: a puzzle in cultural and environmental medicine
    Mathews, John Duncan ( 1971)
    From Kuru – a preliminary account: Kuru, a fatal neurological disorder, has over the last decade, posed a fascinating and tragic problem to the medical world. The disease, which occurs amongst the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands of Australian New Guinea, presents clinically as a progressive disorder of motor function. Patients with early kuru may complain of headache or leg pains. The early signs are of an ataxia of cerebellar type, but the motor deficit progresses rapidly and a marked weakness develops. Emotional lability, which is marked in only a minority of patients, led to the adoption of the term “laughing sickness” by the newspapers. Most kuru victims have been adult women. Before 1960 there was a considerable number of kuru deaths in children of both sexes. More recently, however, there have been no such cases of kuru in young children and the disease incidence has shifted to affect teenagers and young adult men as well as adult women. Kuru has reached a devastating incidence in the South Fore population: since 1957 there have been over 1100 deaths out of a total South Fore population of less than 8000. With such high kuru mortality rates and with low birth rates, the South Fore population was declining in numbers until about 1961. Following a decrease in kuru incidence, the population is again increasing.