Word: gajdusek
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There, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek and his colleagues made an extract of the brain material and injected it into the brains of monkeys and a two-year-old chimpanzee named Georgette. Nothing happened to the monkeys, and for 20 months Georgette kept on growing like a normal chimp. Then, last May, Georgette became apathetic and lethargic. Her lower lip drooped, and she shivered at the slightest chill. Soon, she was staggering and stumbling as she walked; if she reached for a banana, she missed it. When she could hardly move her limbs and screamed at the gentlest touch, the researchers...
...disease in chimpanzees, Dr. Gajdusek reports in Nature, seems essentially the same as kuru in man, except that the animals could not suffer impairment of speech or bouts of maniacal laughter. This evidence, plus data from a similar disease of sheep, called scrapie, strongly suggests that the virus theory is correct. In any case, the ability to reproduce such a disease in animals should aid neurological research...
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...