Word: fored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...giggling. When a tribesman looked into such a hut, he saw no cause for merriment. The laugher was lying ill, exhausted by his guffaws, his face now an expressionless mask. He had no idea that he had laughed, let alone why. New Guinea's Fore (pronounced foray) tribe was afflicted by a deadly foe. It was kuru, the laughing death, a creeping horror hitherto unknown to medicine...
Gruesome Ritual. The Fore people, estimated to number 10,000 and only now emerging from the Stone Age, live in a 240-square-mile area 90 miles west of the famed World War II battlefield of Lae (their existence was unknown until 1932). Kuru was first noted in 1951. The disease has not only decimated the Fore, but has become an obsession in their sorcery beliefs. When a kuru victim dies, the kinsfolk pick out a sorcerer suspected of responsibility for the death, do away with him in a gruesome ritual murder called tukavu, in which they pulverize his muscles...
Only in the last five years has the Australian administration brought the Fore under regular supervision (it rates them "semi-controlled," meaning that they usually resist the temptation to plunge a spear into a patrol officer's back). A year ago the government sent Dr. Vincent Zigas, Estonian-born district medical officer, into the Fore country to investigate kuru. Appalled to find that the disease is invariably fatal, Zigas hurriedly shipped blood and brain specimens from victims to Melbourne's famed Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, hoping that the laboratories would find a virus cause for the disease...
...Body, One Ax. Last March, a peripatetic U.S. virologist and pediatrician (with a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) appeared in New Guinea. Crew-cut Dr. Carleton Gajdusek, 35, of Yonkers, N.Y., heard about kuru and plunged into its problems. Tramping through rain-soaked forests to Fore hamlets, he rounded up patients for the neat, bamboo-walled native hospital at nearby Okapa Patrol Post. To do autopsies, he had to haggle with victims' relatives for the bodies. The currency: axes and tobacco. (Dr. Gajdusek got some bodies at the bargain price of only...
Oldsters among the Fore tribesmen remember few cases of kuru before they grew ''grass belong face" (beards). Thus it seems to have become much commoner in the last generation, is estimated to have killed at least 100 Fore in each recent year. It is unknown elsewhere in New Guinea or in the rest of the world. This has led Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas to suspect a genetic defect, with at least a hereditary tendency to the disease. But NIH pathologists at Bethesda have found widespread nerve cell destruction in brains of six kuru victims, suggesting that the cause...