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No Recoveries. Kuru may strike as early as the age of four. Through childhood it strikes twice as many girls as boys. Among adults the sex ratio rockets to 14 to one: 56% of all patients are grown women. First sign of kuru is a slight trembling of the arms and legs on exertion. At this stage it subsides with rest. But a month to three months later the victim's head shakes, he begins to sway and stumble, and needs a walking stick for support. Within two months more, he is unable to stand or walk, has to be half-carried to tribal pig feasts. In this stage occur the outbursts which have caused kuru to be dubbed the laughing death. Speech gradually becomes more and more slurred until it is unintelligible. Nearly every victim also becomes conspicuously cross-eyed.
Eventually the kuru sufferer is completely helpless, unable to swallow, capable of only slight movement and feeble grunts. In a native hut, he dies of starvation, infected bedsores or pneumonia. At Okapa's hospital, Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas have prevented bedsores, and eliminated starvation as a cause of death by intravenous feedings. And still the patients die. No authentic kuru victim has recovered.
In a report for the New England Journal of Medicine Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas list the treatments they have tried: aspirin, sulfas, three antibiotics, cortisone, hydrocortisone, testosterone, phenobarbital, antihistamines, anti-epilepsy drugs, vitamin B, folic acid, liver extract and even a war-gas antidote, British Anti-Lewisite—all to no avail.
Oldsters among the Fore tribesmen remember few cases of kuru before they grew ''grass belong face" (beards). Thus it seems to have become much commoner in the last generation, is estimated to have killed at least 100 Fore in each recent year. It is unknown elsewhere in New Guinea or in the rest of the world. This has led Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas to suspect a genetic defect, with at least a hereditary tendency to the disease. But NIH pathologists at Bethesda have found widespread nerve cell destruction in brains of six kuru victims, suggesting that the cause may be some kind of poisoning. So an intensive, detailed study of everything that the Fore people eat, drink, smoke, or paint on their bodies is under way.
Meanwhile, since white man's medicine has so far failed them, the Fore see no reason to abandon their own; they still practice tukavu when they think they can get away with it.