The kuru mystery.

Two-part documentary whose subject-matter gradually widens from Kuru, a bizarre degenerative brain disease endemic among the Fore people of New Guinea, to take in current research into the whole range of "slow viruses" in man and animals, of which Kuru is the classic example and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) may possibly be another. Includes harrowing archive film footage of victims of Kuru taken by the Australian colonial administration in Papua New Guinea in the early 1960s, featuring Dr. Carlton Gajdusek (New York), Nobel Prizewinner in Medicine (1971) for his discovery of Kuru and work on slow viruses.