the prion disease kuru was spread through cannibalism), or even between two different species of animal. In the 1980s, we ...

Usually, these diseases emerge spontaneously or through inherited mutations that make our prions prone to misfolding.

But it was the discovery of kuru, ravaging the Fore tribes of Papua New Guinea, that spurred the burst of scientific and public interest in prion diseases. Warwick Anderson, an Australian medical ...

[16] After patient investigations, Gajdusek uncovered the source and mechanism of transmission of kuru. Indeed ... steel instruments may tightly bind prions and be an effective source of infection.

Their findings appear in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kuru, a prion disease similar to CJD in humans and BSE in animals, was transmitted at mortuary feasts where - until the practice was ...

Prions, the causative agents of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, appear to consist entirely of PrP Sc, an orderly aggregated, β sheet–rich isoform of a ubiquitous membrane protein ...