Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague

Natural Health, March-April, 1998 by J.K. Tidmore

By Richard Rhodes

Books about researchers tracking down diseases seem to be replacing detective novels as suspenseful reading for the brainy. After all, what serial killer could be more implacable or horrifying than a previously unknown pathogen, and what detective could be more single-minded and quirky than a researcher? Deadly Feasts may be the best of this genre yet. Not only does it concern something timely and mysterious, it may also concern the next great plague.

It's about a category of ailments that includes the famous Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-jakob disease (CJD), and kuru, all of which cause the brain to turn to swiss cheese and at least two of which, Mad Cow and kuru, seem to be connected with cannibalism. Probably rare cases of these types of diseases have been with us for aeons. But the book begins in 1950, when outbreaks of kuru showed up in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea among a tribe of people who practiced ritual cannibalism. Their greeting to friends literally translated meant, I eat you."

Like any book on science, this one has more than one hero. But it also has one outstanding hero, Dr. Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced Guy-dew-sheck), a hyperactive combination of Louis Pasteur and Indiana )ones who was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. Gajdusek starts out wondering why the women and children of this obscure mountain tribe are being struck down so horribly and so mysteriously, and ends up chasing what he fears might be the new Black Death. (In the case of kuru and Mad Cow, women and children--more than men--were struck because according to tradition, women ate their deceased friends and they inevitably shared the meal with their children.)

Infectious diseases are mostly caused by bacteria or viruses, but these diseases are caused by neither. They are caused by little bundles of protein called prions, infective agents so small that they make even viruses look gigantic. Prions may have arisen naturally through biological errors or by some other means, but they have become a widespread threat because of modern livestock feeding methods; they seem to be so hardy and so contagious that they could now be spread to people not only by the eating of infected meat, but even through the use of leather goods, or by organic fertilizer infecting vegetable crops, which might then infect people who never eat meat. It is possible that there may be nowhere safe from what one scientist called "bad news wrapped in protein."

And yet there is a kind of stark beauty about these prions and about the subtle ingenuity of nature in outwitting our best efforts. Richard Rhodes lyrically describes "nature's boundless depths; layers underlayers down into the very center of things, and layers there too small to see, and layers below those layers until the head swims and still more layers then." This is not a book to help you sleep "Tell, but it is a book to make you think about the Ongoing struggle of life to survive and about the great otherness of the world at large.

EXCERPT: DEADLY FEASTS

Death came cruelly: prostrate kuru victims lost the ability to swallow and starved and thirsted to death, or succumbed before starvation to pneumonia or to the deep, gangrenous bedsores they developed lying in their own urine and excrement, unable to move. --J.K. Tidinore

Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague; Simon & Schuster, 1997; 259 pages, hardcover, $24