An account of the last autopsy carried out on a kuru patient

Introduction

“…There were 15 Papua New Guinean participants, 12 of whom were from the Fore linguistic group, the principal sufferers from kuru since the epidemic began about a century ago. Also attending were Peter Siba, the Director of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, which has been involved in research on kuru since its inception in 1968, Adolf Saweri, the Chairman of the Council of the Institute, who as a young doctor had worked at Okapa, the government station at the centre of the kuru-affected region ( Saweri 2008 ), and Ken Boone, a doctor in Goroka, capital of the Eastern Highlands Province, who in 2003 performed the last autopsy on a kuru patient ( Boone 2008 ).…”