The recycling of the infectious agent through the consumption of deceased relatives amplified the agent and the disease in the community, leading to the epidemic. It is now thought that kuru first arose in a single individual from a spontaneous change that created a pathogenic, infectious agent in the brain, in the same way that sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease occurs. As Lindenbaum observed, the Fore descriptions of their encounter with the new disease were rich in detail. Zigas and Gajdusek noticed that, when the Fore people at Kasarai moved temporarily to live with the Yar people and settled there for about a decade, kuru cases still occurred. The first cases at Purosa, six miles south of Wanitabe, appeared in the 1930s, and, in some southwestern and southeastern areas, it arrived as late as the 1940s (see map ). From Wanikanto, where it appeared in 1927, it turned toward the northwest, to Miarasa and Paigata. It then traveled down the southeastern border, arriving at Wanitabe in the central South Fore by 1930. The Fore reports suggested that kuru first appeared at Uwami, a Keiagana village to the northwest, around 1900, and then in the North Fore around 1920. The disease was confined to natives of the Fore linguistic group in Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands and neighboring linguistic groups (Auiana, Awa, Usurufa, Kanite, Keiagana, Iate, Kamano, and Gimi). A general view of a Fore hamlet (dcg-57-ng-186).
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