Sir

In his review of Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (Nature 386, 565; 1997), Robert Desowitz repeats a fundamental error with regard to the aetiology of kuru. He writes: "Gajdusek and his Australian colleagues, Michael Alpers and Vincent Zigas, showed that cannibalism was the cause of kuru. The Fore women and children, but not the men, ate — totally consumed — their dead relatives."

That cannibalism might be the route to kuru transmission was discovered by two anthropologists, Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse, five years after Gajdusek first arrived in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, years in which every attempt to unravel the cause of kuru had failed. In 1961, they spent nine months with the Fore searching for a possible genetic cause for kuru. None existed.

Their second visit proved more fruitful. A New Zealand neurologist and epidemiologist, Dr R.W. Hornbrook, suggested that they try to answer the question "what is it that the adult women and the children of both sexes in the Fore tribe are doing that the adult men are not?”.

They found that the women, who prepared the bodies for burial, occasionally ate part of the flesh and of the steamed brain tissue. But far from their "totally consuming their dead relatives", or cannibalism being a ritual in the Fore tribe, it was a casual practice that had infiltrated from tribes in the south of the region within living memory. The Fore themselves said that "it was after the first aeroplane flew over that we tried cannibalism for the first time”.

Back at the US National Institutes of Health, Gajdusek and Joe Gibbs now tried to induce kuru in nonhuman primates by feeding them with kuru-infected human brain. They failed to induce the disease, even when they inserted the infected tissue directly into the stomach through a gastric tube. So they believe that direct inoculation into the bloodstream or through the mucous membrane was the route of infection. Women and children with cuts and sores on their hands would frequently rub their eyes and noses when handling dead bodies, so any infectious particles could enter the body quite easily.