Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [34]
‘W
hy are you killing off all the women, stealing our faeces from the latrines to perform sorcery?’ In 1962, Shirley Lindenbaum, an anthropologist living with the Fore tribe in the lush eastern highlands of New Guinea, witnessed an extraordinary spectacle. The Fore women had gathered the entire tribe together to accuse their men of witchcraft and murder.
‘We women give birth to you men,’ the spokeswoman continued. ‘Try to find one man who is pregnant now and show him to us. Or go and search the old burial grounds and bring us the skull or bones of one man we women have killed. You won’t be able to find any. You men are trying to wipe us out.’
The complaint was not without justification. The tribeswomen, and many of their children, were being struck down by a mystery illness. In ten years, more than a thousand women and children had fallen victim to kuru, the shaking disease. The Fore men, on the other hand, were almost untouched. By the early 1960s the impact of the disease was such that there were three Fore men for every woman. The birth rate fell almost as fast as the marriageable age. The shortage of women meant that girls were now being married off almost as soon as they entered puberty.
The first symptoms of kuru are an unsteadiness on the feet, slurring speech, tremors and shivers. Later there are outbursts of laughter, and then the muscles start to spasm and jerk. Victims fall into depression, lose the ability to walk and become doubly incontinent. Death comes as a merciful release.
Virologist Carleton Gajdusek was the first doctor to come to the Fore’s aid. He arrived from Melbourne in 1957, but for years he made little headway. His photographs of the tribespeople are heartbreaking: the women and children are walking with sticks, or beyond help and needing to be carried. These are some of the captions he wrote for the photographs:
A girl, about 8 years old, who was no longer able to speak, but who was still alert and intelligent … Four preadolescent children, totally incapacitated … none had been ill for over six months, and all died within a few months of the time of photography … The youngest patient with kuru, from Mage village, North Fore, who self-diagnosed the insidious onset of clumsiness in his gait as kuru at 4 years of age, and died at 5 years of age, several years before his mother developed kuru herself.
Gajdusek understood the Fore’s reasoning that sorcery must be to blame. He came to respect the local traditions, even accepting that their magical reasoning had positive repercussions:
Patients know they are to die; they have observed the terminal incapacitating stages of the disease in others, and, yet, discuss the matter of their advancing illness freely and without apparent anxiety. They will laugh at their own stumbling gait and falls, their clumsiness, inability to get food into their mouths, and their exaggerated involuntary movements, and their kinsmen will join them. The family members live with the dying patient … parents sleep with their kuru-incapacitated child cuddled to them, and a husband will patiently lie beside his terminal uncommunicative, foul-smelling spouse … the emotionalism and euphoria of kuru is supplemented by a security engendered from certain knowledge that one is accepted by his villagers as an unfortunate victim of kuru sorcery, whom they will not desert before death claims him. The vengeful search for the offending sorcerer, which is often the primary concern of the patient’s kinsmen, is a source of further emotional support.
Western medicine, Gajdusek noted, had nothing to offer. His letters home convey a sense of uselessness:
[T]hey know damn well that we do nothing for the disease, but prolong its misery by supportive measures, and they are anxious to return to their technique of starvation and neglect in darkness, which ends in a speedy exodus once the illness is truly incapacitating.
Despite the depressing futility of his efforts to care for the Fore, Gajdusek continued to study kuru. It was frustrating work: the disease seemed to strike from