Word: gajdusek
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Okapa, Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas ran the risk of getting kuru themselves (if it should prove infectious); lacking surgical gloves, they did autopsies barehanded. They performed them on a dining-room table in the patrol officer's quarters, often eating a meal at one end while discussing the kuru-damaged brains lying at the other. They shipped specimens to Melbourne and to the U.S. National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. From 154 patients and their kin, they got a detailed picture of kuru's course, though no clue to its cause...
Eventually the kuru sufferer is completely helpless, unable to swallow, capable of only slight movement and feeble grunts. In a native hut, he dies of starvation, infected bedsores or pneumonia. At Okapa's hospital, Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas have prevented bedsores, and eliminated starvation as a cause of death by intravenous feedings. And still the patients die. No authentic kuru victim has recovered...
...report for the New England Journal of Medicine Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas list the treatments they have tried: aspirin, sulfas, three antibiotics, cortisone, hydrocortisone, testosterone, phenobarbital, antihistamines, anti-epilepsy drugs, vitamin B, folic acid, liver extract and even a war-gas antidote, British Anti-Lewisite-all to no avail...
...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 may be some kind of poisoning. So an intensive, detailed study of everything that...