Trump alerted to kuru virus

PAPUA NEW GUINEA – A human rights group in Papua New Guinea has congratulated US President-elect Donald Trump on his victory – optimistic that he will correct alleged US atrocities in relation to historic disease research in the Eastern Highlands 60 years ago.

Kuru Foundation Incorporation released a media statement this week saying it had been petitioning the Barack Obama administration for reparation payment and restorative justice for the “murders and butchery of more than 7000 people of the Fore area of Okapa District and theft of human materials between 1957 and 2003”.

“Our petition is about an injustice pulled off by the US military scientist, Dr Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, and his associates, who had been investigating an exotic disease called kuru and exported human materials, including brains, secretly to isolated scientific and military laboratories in USA says,” the foundation’s director Pala Hou Anikava.

He said from the autopsy material, and scientific studies made on it, scientists created the fatal “kuru virus” – which had been isolated at the Fort Detrick P4 Biological Warfare military laboratory in USA.

He added that the scientific research on kuru had produced two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Dr Daniel Carleton Gajdusek and Dr Stanley B Prusina.

In 1996, Dr Gajdusek – who was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for his work on kuru – was charged with child molestation and after being convicted, spent 12 months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade later.

Before his disgrace, Gajdusek’s work focused on kuru, a disease which was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s.

Gajdusek was introduced to the problem of Kuru by Vincent Zigas, a district medical officer in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea. He connected the spread of the disease to the practice of funerary cannibalism by the South Fore.

Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder, which was miscast in the popular press as the “laughing sickness”.

He lived among the Fore people, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims.

Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives.

In the course of his research trips in the South Pacific, Gajdusek had brought 56 mostly male children back to live with him in the US, and provided them with the opportunity to receive high school and college educations.

He was later accused by one of these, now an adult man, of molesting him as a child.

Gajdusek died in exile on December 12, 2008, in Tromso, Norway, at the age of 85. - PNC