Minneapolis/St. Paul

Robert Klitzman, M.D.: The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease

by Eric Lorberer
August 5, 1998

Robert Klitzman, M.D.
The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease
Plenum Press

FAITHFUL VIEWERS OF television's conspiracy-driven shows The X-Files and Millennium already know about prions, infectious proteins that turn the brain (and thus, eventually, the body) into a bloody sponge. On TV, prions do their damage quickly, giving second-string actors a chance to die overly dramatic deaths while oozing blood from every orifice. Robert Klitzman's The Trembling Mountain offers a less cinematic look at the little devils, but one that's ultimately just as menacing.

This isn't news, of course. A recent spate of plague books has foretold that epidemics of staggering proportion are about to make the human race go out with a whimper. But Klitzman's book has a unique perspective: In the early '80s, the author, now an M.D., spent several months as a fresh-faced college graduate doing research among the Fore people in Papua New Guinea--research which turns out to have great relevance to the battle against biological invaders we are seemingly beginning to wage.

Prions are still a relative cipher in the world of science. In fact, as Klitzman is quick to point out, it's not even clear if they are the cause or the result of the diseases with which they are associated. Those diseases include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which many scientists believe is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's and thus not as rare as we'd like to think. The latest and greatest rash of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's flared up as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (i.e., "Mad Cow" disease) in Britain. British health authorities linked the transmission of this disease to eating diseased beef, leading to the slaughter of much of that nation's cattle stock, and giving vegetarianism its best press since Upton Sinclair. But Papua New Guinea takes the prize for the greatest concentration of an infectious protein disease; kuru claimed the lives of nearly two-thirds of the population of the Fore tribe, becoming so much a part of the culture that the locals named their turf Kuru Mountain. (Fun fact: "No other area in the world has been named after a disease.")

Like Mad Cow disease, kuru was passed on through the eating of meat, but in this case, human meat: The Fore ate their dead until colonial missionaries and police attempted to put an end to this native practice. "Had Caucasians not entered the area when they did," writes Klitzman, "the Fore may have vanished."

This, at least, is the Western scientific version. The Fore believe that kuru is caused by sorcery, and some of the book's best prose shows why this belief makes sense and can be "proven" in their culture. Nevertheless, as cannibalism decreased so did the occurrence of the disease, and Klitzman, by examining and interviewing those who took part in such feasts, was able to document its lineage and incubation periods. His findings are hardly cheering, though. On a recent trip back to Papua New Guinea, Klitzman found a 47-year-old man dying of kuru whose mother had died of kuru when he was a child. As the author sadly notes, "He would now die from a meal consumed 41 years ago."

One doesn't have to be a cannibal to appreciate the ramifications of such research. Thousands or more people in Britain and elsewhere might be carrying similarly devastating internal time bombs, and the transmission of infectious diseases is surely facilitated by our unprecedented ability to reach formerly isolated pockets of the globe. What's worse, as Klitzman points out, is that humans of all cultures tend to behave shortsightedly when faced with illnesses that have long incubation periods, be they kuru, Mad Cow disease, or AIDS. The story he tells in The Trembling Mountain may thus prove to be the first chapter in the longer epic of our struggle to survive.

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