Kuru, Prions, and Human Affairs: Thinking About Epidemics

The study of epidemics provides a unique point of entry for examining the relationships among cultural assumptions, institutional forms, and states of mind. The Black Death is said to have contributed to the emergence of nation states, the rise of mercantile economies, and the religious movements that led to the Reformation. It may also have brought about new ways of understanding God, the meaning of death, and the role of authority in religious and social life. Cholera induced a public health approach that stressed quarantine, and venereal diseases led to contact tracing. Western medicine, however, failed to cure the epidemics that resulted from imperial expansion into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The focus of this essay is on the impact of two contemporary epidemics considered to be caused by prions, a newly recognized infectious agent: kuru in Papua New Guinea and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in Europe. A close look at epidemics constitutes a sampling device for illuminating relationships among illness, social forms, and social thought. Theories of disease causation provide ways of thinking about the world and sets of directions for acting in it.