Jared Diamond's Experience with the Cannibals of Papua New Guinea

Summary by Krater

Joe Rogan interviews a guest discussing the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, endocannibalism, and the kuru disease transmitted by eating human brain tissue.

From the video

Answers: What is kuru and how did the Fore people contract it?

• Fore people
• Papua New Guinea
• endocannibalism
• kuru disease
• prion diseases
• Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
• scrapie
• chimpanzee experiments

What it concludes

• The Fore people of Papua New Guinea practiced endocannibalism, consuming dead relatives including their brains.
• Kuru is a prion disease transmitted through the consumption of uncooked or inadequately cooked brain tissue containing infectious prions.
• Prions can survive thousands of degrees of temperature and are not reliably destroyed by ordinary cooking or standard steam sterilization.
• Experiments at the National Institute of Health showed that chimpanzees fed infected human brain tissue developed and died of kuru after three years.
• The last transmission of kuru occurred in 1959, and the last death from the disease was recorded in 2009.