Eating Brains Helped Papua New Guinea Tribe Avoid Disease

Scientists studying the effect that brain-eating had on a tribe in Papua New Guinea have revealed that their cannibalistic tendencies helped them to resist a variety of diseases.

Researchers from both Papua New Guinea and Britain are looking into the Fore tribe’s unusual diet have now gathered more information on and understand in more detail mad cow disease and other prion conditions. According to the Guardian, scientists are now set to have more insight into dementia and Parkinson’s.

The Fore tribe’s ritual would see members eating the brains of their relatives at their funerals. This has since been abandoned though. But by doing this, the people of this tribe had developed a genetic resistance to kuru, a disease that is similar to mad-cow.

Back in the late 1950s, when the Fore people were still eating the brains of their dead tribe, a humungous epidemic of kuru ravaged the people. This lead to the death of around 2 percent of their population every single year.

However, the emergence of the CJD resistance gene means that the current members of the tribe are able to resist kuru, and they are also able to stave off different elements of dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s too.

Published in the journal Nature, via the Guardian, John Collinge, who works at the Institute of Neurology’s prion unit at University College Of London, led the research and offered up this explanation of his stunning findings.

“This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia.”

Collinge and his fellow researchers are now set to embark on further studies so they can learn more from their studies, and then translate it so that they use it to help combat various other neurodegenerative diseases. This includes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare but fatal brain disorder that first rose to prominence after people ate BSE infected beef in the 1980s.

Speaking to the BBC, Prof Collinge added, “This could provide great insights into how the disease works and ultimately how to stop it.”

While discussing the attempt to battle CJD, Collinge added that this research is only the beginning. “It is important that we don’t drop our guard. Thirty thousand people are silently carrying the disease and we don’t know whether they will carry on carrying the disease without developing symptoms or go on to develop the disease.”

[Image via Things Nerds Like]