, but it was consistent with a slow infectious disease. The slow march of kuru was inconsistent with a contemporary genetic hypothesis of Bennett et al. The recycling of the infectious agent through the consumption of deceased relatives amplified the agent and the disease in the community, leading to the epidemic. It is now thought that kuru first arose in a single individual from a spontaneous change that created a pathogenic, infectious agent in the brain, in the same way that sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease occurs. As Lindenbaum observed, the Fore descriptions of their encounter with the new disease were rich in detail. Zigas and Gajdusek noticed that, when the Fore people at Kasarai moved temporarily to live with the Yar people and settled there for about a decade, kuru cases still occurred. The first cases at Purosa, six miles south of Wanitabe, appeared in the 1930s, and, in some southwestern and southeastern areas, it arrived as late as the 1940s (see map ). From Wanikanto, where it appeared in 1927, it turned toward the northwest, to Miarasa and Paigata.

It then traveled down the southeastern border, arriving at Wanitabe in the central South Fore by 1930.

The Fore reports suggested that kuru first appeared at Uwami, a Keiagana village to the northwest, around 1900, and then in the North Fore around 1920. The disease was confined to natives of the Fore linguistic group in Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands and neighboring linguistic groups (Auiana, Awa, Usurufa, Kanite, Keiagana, Iate, Kamano, and Gimi). My peers, the medical scientists, who read this will realize that this book is neither a scientific treatise, nor a balance-sheet of all the achievements and failures of medical science, but a presentation of the major implications of the factors that continually determine our medical ethics - including some of the less prizeworthy drawbacks.A general view of a Fore hamlet (dcg-57-ng-186). It is also my concern to produce innocent amusement, unrestricted by canon or precedent, for those who require some relaxation from the fatigue generated by so many parasitic forms of life in this less than perfect world. This book is for them, in lieu of letters that I ought to have written and did not. All these have constantly requested more news of my 'Green Dwelling' and my discovery of a fatal neurological disease previously unknown to Western medicine. It has been a difficult, sometimes painful, story to tell in its entirety, but I have done my best to be accurate both in facts and in dates, for I feel that l owe the truth to the many who have become valued acquaintances, and sometimes friends.

Laughing Death by Vincent Zigas