Scientists believe providing an example of evolution, it may be possible to find a treatment for mad cow disease with help from a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea, whose members used to eat the brains of dead relatives.

The Fore tribe from the Eastern Highlands province of the south-east Asian nation, at one time ritually consumed the brains of dead tribes people, which rapidly spread a brain affliction akin to mad cow disease, which threatened to wipe out their entire population.

After the banning of the ritual in the 1950s, rapid genetic mutation protecting the tribe against the condition has ended the chronic wasting disease, called kuru. Like the mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD), kuru is also caused by prions i.e. the unusual folding of brain proteins.

The study has been reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, with study lead Dr. Mead believing further study of the rapid protection within the tribe could help in finding a treatment for CJD, occurring randomly in about one in a million people.

At one time entire generations of women in remote Papuan villages were wiped out by Kuru, and which was traced to mortuary ceremony, now defunct, in which women and children ate the brains of their dead relatives.

Women in these communities due to their protective gene, seemed more likely to live to a ripe old age, however, those without it died young of Kuru, depicting a classic example of evolution in humans, says Dr. Mead, whose team studied over 3,000 Papuans, of which 709 had participated in cannibalistic feasts and 152 who died of Kuru.