Kuru likened to scrapie; the story remembered

摘要

In my letter to the editor of the Lancet of 5 September 1959, I pointed out the striking similarity of kuru and scrapie and suggested that kuru, like scrapie, might be a transmissible disease expressed after a long incubation period (Hadlow 1959). The unlikely linkage of these two diseases came about fortuitously while I was an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture studying the pathology of scrapie at the then Agricultural Research Council Field Station at Comp-ton in Berkshire, England, beginning in March 1958.