ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the ways in which three sets of actors explained kuru, the devastating disease that once threatened the survival of the Fore, a population in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. Medical accounts, in general, portrayed kuru as an epidemic, describing the epidemiological, clinical, and pathological dimensions of the disease. With the cessation of cannibalism by 1960, the transmission of kuru had stopped, and by 1995 the incubation period had reached at least thirty-five years. With no kuru death in 2005 and only one in 2007, the epidemic appears to be coming to end. Between 1957 and 1977 some twenty-five hundred people in population of fourteen thousand died from kuru. Waisa, long outpost for kuru investigation, has since 1996 become center for prion research among the Fore, resulting in more intense interactions with scientific investigators. Kuru, like bovine spongiform encephalopathy and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is now considered to be acquired forms of prion disease.
