Can Cannibalism Fight Brain Disease? Only Sort Of.

Can cannibalism fight a rare brain disease? That’s what multiple headlines have suggested this week, but don’t pick up your fork just yet. A study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature found that people of Papua New Guinea’s Fore tribe -- a group that formerly consumed the brains of family members at funerals -- are now resistant to a rare, degenerative brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). However, the reason that they developed this resistance to the disease is because their brain-eating practice led to a major outbreak of kuru -- a specific type of CJD -- in the 1950s, Reuters reports.. A Nature news release explains that CJD occurs sporadically, but it spreads if someone consumes the brain of someone who has it. The epidemic killed as much as 2 percent of the tribe’s population each year during its height in the 1950s, according to Reuters. The newest paper states that the Fore people -- who ceased practicing cannibalism by the end of the 1950s -- now have genetic resistance to kuru, according to Reuters. Even more impressively, researchers found that the kuru-resistant gene also protects against all forms of CJD. "This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans,” study co-author John Collinge of the University College London's Institute of Neurology told Reuters. During a kuru outbreak, people with the kuru-resistant gene were more likely to survive, reproduce, and therefore pass that gene along to their offspri...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news