Papua New Guinea
(IN PHOTO) A Papua New Guinean dancer from the New Ireland province wears a red "Tang" mouthpiece (R) as others dress in palm leaves as "Tumbjan" spirits during the opening ceremony of South Pacific Forum in Papua New Guinea's capital city Port Moresby October 25, 2005. Leaders from 16 South Pacific nations will this week hold a summit in the crime-ridden capital city, where murders and rapes have tripled this year, focusing on regional and local security. Pacific Forum members range from Australia to the tiny island state of Niue and cover over 30 million sq km (11.6 million sq miles) of ocean, with more than 1,000 languages. The Forum is expected to adopt a "Pacific Plan" of regional cooperation in areas such as security, aviation and trade, in what one diplomat called a South Pacific version of an informal European Union. Reuters

While Papua New Guinea has banned the eating of brains of the dead in the 1950s, a research in 2009 of an elderly woman from the Fore tribe who survived the country’s kuru epidemic showed that the practice helped the natives develop resistance to some brain diseases. The scientists performed a genetic analysis on the survivor and found two promising mutations in PrP, the 127th and 129th amino acids of the protein.

A misshaped protein spread through Papua, leading to the spread of kuru that killed up to 10 percent of their population in the mid-20th century. Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases are caused by prions, a type of misfolded proteins, which cause normal proteins to misshapen. Prions spread through the brains, causing microscopic holes than makes the brain “spongy,” reports Gizmondo.

Eating the brain of a dead tribe member was a mourning ritual then, which caused the spread of the prion. When scientists tested the mutations in mice that were exposed to kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob ailment – the equivalent of mad cow diseases in humans – the rodents with one copy of the mutation in 129 has some resistance to prion diseases. However, the rats with one or two copies of the mutation in 127 had complete resistance to prion ailments.

The study by British and Papuan researchers offers a better understanding of other mental ailments such as Parkinson’s and dementia, reports The Guardian. It was published in the Nature journal.

John Collinge, co-leader of the research and from the prion unit of the University College London’s Institute of Neurology, said, “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.”

As an infectious agent, priors cause deadly mental brain ailments such as the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, scrapie in sheep and mad cow in cattle. The process involved – wherein the prion proteins change shape and stick together to form polymers that damage the brain – is also what takes place in other mental ailments such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Scientists are now holding more studies to understand the molecular basis of the effect, said Collinge. Their findings would provide clues on what starts the misshaping of proteins that develop in the brain and result in common forms of dementia.

To contact the writer, email: vittoriohernandez@yahoo.com

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