This week's programme in the series on Man and Science Today.

Kuru is a disease which affects only one small tribe in the remote highlands of New Guinea. It starts with a slight trembling of the hands and finally leaves the victim a helpless shaking jelly unable to control any movement - unable to live. Not surprisingly "Kuru" means "to tremble with fear".
What makes it not only more bizarre but also more fascinating to a scientist like Professor E.J. Field of Newcastle, who went to New Guinea to study it, is its link with cannibalism. It's been suggested that to contract Kuru you have to eat someone who has died of the disease. For Professor Field it is this seemingly irrelevant information that makes Kuru more than an isolated curiosity. It helps link it with multiple sclerosis, with the mental disorder schizophrenia, even with the process of ageing, in a new group of diseases all thought to be caused by slow acting viruses.
Tonight's programme plots the development of an intriguing new theory which could be opening up a new field of medicine.

(Colour)