Nasgp | The Art Of Gp Locuming

Recently, in Tromsø, the Arctic capital of Norway, I came across the name Carleton Gajdusek. That name took me back many years and halfway round the globe to a village in the Fore district of Papua New Guinea. A man is standing in the doorway of his hut, clinging to the doorpost, his head nodding, before making his way unsteadily, emaciated and ataxic, to another hut. He has kuru. Dr Gajdusek was an American virologist and he spent the last years of his life in Tromsø. He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the aetiology of kuru. Traditionally, the Fore people honoured their dead by eating their flesh, the men receiving the muscles for strength, the women being left with the brain and scrag ends. The custom of eating human flesh had already died out with the missionaries, and Gajdusek hypothesized that kuru was caused by an infective agent – he called it a ‘slow virus’– with a long incubation period. He postulated that it was concentrated in the nervous system, explaining why women were more likely to develop