Mad Cow Disease / Kuru / CJD in the Fore Tribe
About five or six years later, after the Japanese had been driven out, the poor people of the Fore tribe developed what they called kuru, which was their word for "wasting", and they began to shake, lose their appetites and die. The autopsies revealed that their brains had literally turned to mush. They had contracted "mad cow disease" from the Japanese experiments.
When World War II ended, Dr Ishii Shiro—the medical doctor who was commissioned as a General in the Japanese Army so he could take command of Japan’s biological warfare development, testing and deployment—was captured. He was given the choice of a job with the United States Army or execution as a war criminal. Not surprisingly, Dr Ishii Shiro chose to work with the US military to demonstrate how the Japanese had created mad cow disease in the Fore Indian tribe.
In 1957, when the disease was beginning to blossom in full among the Fore people, Dr Carleton Gajdusek of the US National Institutes of Health headed to New Guinea to determine how the minced-up brains of the visna-infected sheep affected them. He spent a couple of years there, studying the Fore people, and wrote an extensive report. He won the Nobel Prize for "discovering" kuru disease in the Fore tribe.
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