Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks

Thank you for not ruining the story of the monster of the millennium.  Of course, I am referring to Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, and the video “Storyville: The genius and the Boys”.

 Kuru, a human TSE thought to be transmitted via ritualistic cannibalism, shares
similar clinical features with peripherally inoculated iatrogenic CJD and is known to have
an incubation period ranging from 4.5 to over 35 years.

Chimpanzees fed millions of infectious units of kuru brain never developed the neurological disease that chimpanzees injected with kuru brain did.

Is that because kuru is not transmitted by eating?  Did Gajdusek inject the Fore with CJD?  Yes. Both questions.

Why? To get access to the Kuks.
How?  An outbreak of “transfusion errors” led to the deaths of some 300 recipients of freeze dried serum or products that had been through the same equipment used to freeze dry the serum from a French sailor.  This individual had been on board a French vessel in New York harbor on December 11, 1941 when the United States of America and Nazi Germany declared war on each other.  The individual was taken into custody on December 12, 1941.  The individual had fought the Germans during the first world war.  Due to his age, and disposition, he ended up in the Merchant Marine.  Sailing to Maracaibo, he became unable to perform his duties, and was set ashore, where he died of “alcoholic dementia”.  Previously, he had donated blood.  The blood was processed into serum and freeze dried.  The reconstituted serum was administered to a pilot trainee who had suffered burns and broken bones.  The pilot trainee made a good recovery from the accident.   He developed what was at the time an unknown neuropathy, and died.  This was connected to the French sailor after sixty additional transfusion errors resulting in neuropathy and death.  The airman had received the reconstituted serum, the others had received serum from other individuals, not suffering from “alcoholic dementia” that had been processed in the same equipment and became ill, and died.  Three hundred suffered from “transfusion error”.

The equipment was quarantined, at the Institute for Tropical Medicine.  After the war, did Gajdusek sniff around the Army files to unearth this equipment?
Yes.

At this point, I called a Felix Frankfurter.  I saw the files, WWII stuff in the sub basement of the commerce department.  It was the summer of 1977.  Gajdusek had won a Nobel the year before.  Yeah, that's War department files and folders, but this is not possible.  Jeffery wouldn't let me keep the files, as he may have appropriated them from his father from the State department annex.  Jeffery's father given name was Nathan Hale.

How did Gajdusek get away with this?
Easy, the region in PNG where he did his crime was previously part of the German empire.  German attitudes persisted in the former colony into the 1970's (1,2).  Melanesian were lab animals, not human beings.

It was a crime of genius, but a crime, not science.  Injecting women and children with Iodinated oil fortified with CJD.
How was this missed?  It wasn't.  Smarter kids than me noticed that Gajdusek got his jollies and his paycheck in the same place.   New disease, fame, helpless boys.  Divine or diabolic intervention? Or atrocity. You pick, you defend.

Reproducible, this epidemic was.  MOOOOOOO

Very Truly Yours

Charles Walsh

charles.edward.walsh@gmail.com



1 Lancet October 16, 1965 pp767-769
2 Lancet February 13, 1971 pp308-310

Unproven, but Replicable

I don't think you think I'm wrong, but I might be, but I'm not, most probably. The Kuku Kuku with their peculiar habits, living next to the Kuru kuru victims, both of great interest to Carleton Gajdusek seems to good to be true, from the perspective of Gajdusek. So it isn't true, that the disease occurred naturally. It was instead a incidence of iatrogenic disease, transmitted by Gajdusek to women and children during a cretinism prevention campaign.