Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague [Paperback]

In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and France—and that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new afterword for the paperback, Rhodes reports the latest US and worldwide developments of a burgeoning global threat.Chaper One

I Eat You

South Fore, New Guinea Eastern Highlands, 1950

Dark night in the mountains and no drums beating. No flute music like birdsong from the forest above the village -- the men controlled the flutes and this was women's business, secret and delicious, sweet revenge. In pity and mourning but also in eagerness the dead woman's female relatives carried her cold, naked body down to her sweet-potato garden bordered with flowers. They would not abandon her to rot in the ground. Sixty or more women with their babies and small children gathered around, gathered wood, lit cooking fires that caught the light in their eyes and shone on their greased dark skins. The dead woman's daughter and the wife of her adopted son took up knives of split bamboo, their silicate skin sharp as glass. They began to cut the body for the feast.

New Guinea was the last wild place on earth. Its fierce reputation repelled explorers. Micronesians canoe-wrecked anywhere in its vicinity swam the other way. Captain Bligh, put off theBountyafter his crew's notorious mutiny, gave the violent island wide berth. It was the largest island in the world after Greenland, fifteen hundred miles long, four hundred miles wide, shaped like a dinosaur with a central cordillera of mountains for a spine, rising out of the Western Pacific just below the Equator north of Australia, eastward of Sumatra and Borneo. Mangrove swamps fouled its tropical coasts; its mountainous interior rose barricadló,