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Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Fact Sheet. CJD cannot be transmitted through the air or through touching or most other forms of casual contact.
Spouses and other household members of sporadic CJD patients have no higher risk of contracting the disease than the general population. However, exposure to brain tissue and spinal cord fluid from infected individuals should be avoided to prevent transmission of the disease through these materials. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Evolution via Cannibalism: The Case of Kuru « Science Life Blog « University of Chicago Medicine. In the 1950s and ’60s, several villages in the Oceanic country of Papua New Guinea began to see an odd disease.
Villagers of the Fore people in the Eastern Highlands – predominantly women and children – would show an array of frightening symptoms that rapidly worsened over about six months: muscle tremors, uncontrollable laughter, slurring of speech and finally an inability to move and swallow. In the 1960′s, European scientists began to study people with the disease, called kuru for the Fore word for “shiver,” and made two astonishing discoveries. First, that kuru represented a new kind of infectious disease that caused the brain and nervous system to degenerate. Second, that kuru probably resulted from people eating their dead relatives.