In the 1950s, among the Fore people of Papau New Guinea, up to 200 people a year were dying of a mysterious degenerative illness called kuru. It turned out that kuru was the tip of the iceberg of transmissible prion diseases including Creutzfeldt-Jakod Disease and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease.
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That time they discovered kuru
