Word: gajdusek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gajdusek believes that slow-acting viruses may be to blame for no fewer than 30 human diseases of the nervous and muscular systems, some rare, some common. In the hope of explaining them -and thus, eventually, of curing or preventing them-he is weaving together all the seemingly disparate threads of disease in mink, sheep and men, and painstakingly amassing information for which earlier virologists would not wait...
...That, Gajdusek says, may have been a mistake. Some of these delayed-fuse viruses may take years to exert their malign effects in small animals, and decades in long-lived Homo sapiens. Virologist Gajdusek, a human whirlwind who goes around the world half a dozen times a year, decided to become a model of patience. At the institute, he set up a long-range study program with a variety of animals, ranging from tree shrews to sheep and goats, a dozen species of monkeys, and a number of forbiddingly expensive chimpanzees...
...Parkinsonism. His patience paid off. From New Guinea, Gajdusek brought back parts of kuru victims' brains. He injected some of the material into chimpanzees, and waited-for two years. Then the chimps began to show the wobbly gait, slavering and eye-crossing that mark the human disease. When they died, their brains showed essentially the same type of damage as those of human kuru victims...
...result of a slow-acting virus, transmitted from one Fore to another by cannibalism. Women and children who ate the brains of tribesmen who died of kuru far outnumber men as kuru victims. Cannibalism was stamped out-or so the Australian government thinks -about twelve years ago. Gajdusek reports hopefully that there has not been a single case of kuru among children born in the past twelve years...
Minlc and Man. To researchers, there are many suggestive similarities between scrapie in sheep and multiple sclerosis in man. Poskanzer has suggested that MS may be a late manifestation of a childhood infection similar to that of non-paralytic polio. Gajdusek sees a striking resemblance between Aleutian mink disease and a lethal congenital detect in partially albino children...