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Kuru is a form of prion disease which leads to tremors and loss of coordination from neurodegeneration. The term kúru means “trembling” and comes from the Fore word kuria or guria ("to shake"). [2] [3] It is also known as the "laughing sickness" due to the pathologic bursts of laughter which are a symptom of the infection.
The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria—or mass psychogenic illness (MPI)—rumored to have occurred in or near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika (which, once united with Zanzibar, became the modern nation of Tanzania) near the border with Uganda.
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (/ ˈ ɡ aɪ d ə ʃ ɛ k / GHY-də-shek; [1] September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, [2] implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional ...
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Kuru (also known as "laughing sickness" due to the outbursts of laughter that mark its second phase) was first noted in New Guinea in the early 1900s. Kuru is now known to be a prion disease, one of several known transmissible spongiform encephalopathies .
A Seattle police officer is under investigation by a city watchdog agency after joking about the death of a university student who was hit by a speeding patrol car on its way to an 911 call ...
Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell reportedly apologised to the members of the Indian community amid outrage over a police officer joking about the death of a university student.
In the years after these investigations, Zigas published two autobiographical books about his time in Papua New Guinea characterizing kuru. The first, Auscultation of Two Worlds was published in 1978 and the second, Laughing Death, was published posthumously in 1990. End note: Dr Vin Zigas is survived by his eldest son, Dr Misha Zigas who was a ...