It explicitly mentions Kuru as "prion disease", it ignores that the mortuary practice of eating various parts of respected dead has long passed in time .. although the lingering effect on the woman and children that ate portions of the brain in the 1970s, early 1980s, is still residual in a very few.

From an evolutionary PoV a perfect defence is overkill - with two separate defences against prion diseases in that region it's only the rare variation that causes any issue - and that rarely occurs before a new generation is birthed - ie. 'perfect' from the PoV of the selfish genes.

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awesome_dude a day ago | parent [-]

The claim is that people in PNG are "largely immune" to these diseases, where kuru shows that they are not, and the "cure" was a stop in the practice, not some evolutionary upgrade

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defrost a day ago | parent | next [-]

They are largely immune to Kuru - the number of people that could contract it (ie. the number who ate brain) was significantly larger than the number of people who actually did contract it.

The resistance came about via two separate "evolutionary upgrade"(s).

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awesome_dude 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I cannot find any such claim in the literature.

It appears to me that, like BSE (aka Mad Cow disease) it really depends on exposure.

	▲	defrost 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was specifically endemic to the Fore, not so much to the Yate and Usurufa, and not particularly at all to other highland people in the general region. There's a twofer that skittled the Fore, a ~1900 mutation that created a new form of infectious prion proteins, and a local variation that saw less uptake in the Fore of a resistant prion protein (alongside other resistant prion protein). So, over the highlands region, there was general resistance thanks to several evolved variations, in one specific locale (the Fore) there was insufficient resistance to the mutation that hit a peak of 200 deaths / annum for about three years(?) in the late 50s. I can't speak to "the literature", I just had a lot of conversations with the people on the ground (Mike Alpers, etc), on again / off again, since the mid 1960s.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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