KURU , mysterious brain disease of 20th century caused by eating brains of the dead , cannibalism

In the middle of the 20th century the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea was gripped by a mysterious disease which left entire villages without adult women.

The Fore people at the centre of the outbreak called it kuru – the word for shivering – as people lost control of their limbs and bodily functions before a tremor set in preceding death.

The tribe had been relatively isolated from the rest of the world until the 1930s, but by the height of the epidemic in the 1950s it had attracted the attention of researchers from around the world trying to understand the disease, which had eluded explanation.