Kuru: They Ate Their Dead, Properly Awful
Category: Morbid Curiosities 20th July 2026
Back in a valley in Papua New Guinea there was a custom that sounds like it came from a daft storybook but was actually deadly serious. When someone died, their family sometimes ate parts of the corpse as an act of love and respect. Not the usual roast dinner tribute-actual brain and other tissues were eaten in mourning rituals.
The daft and tragic bit is that this practice spread a disease called kuru. The name means something like 'to shake' in the local tongue because people developed tremors. It was not a bug, not a fungus, and nowhere near polite: it was caused by prions, misfolded proteins that turn other proteins into useless copies of themselves. You eat infected brain, years later your nervous system starts unravelling, and there is no cure. Proper grim.
Mostly women and children were struck. Why? Because the mourners who handled and ate the most brain tissue were often women and kids. So the illness had this cruel social pattern: the people showing affection got the worst of it. Symptoms were nasty-laughing fits that weren't funny, balance problems, and a slow slide into complete incapacity. Once symptoms started, it usually finished people off within months to a few years.
Anthropologists and health workers eventually explained the science and persuaded communities to stop those parts of the ritual. Incidence fell away. The epidemic burned itself out once the transmission route was shut. To think: a thing meant as honouring the dead was literally passing on death like a footnote. Nature's sense of irony is a right bastard.
I remember being told this years back and thinking how mad it is that culture and biology can argue like that. You can't look at a burial rite and say 'that's nice' without remembering it might have a dark aftertaste-sometimes literally. Proper morbid curiosity, that one. Makes you grateful for modern funeral planners and takeaway menus, doesn't it?