Jahnavi Sarma
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Written By: Jahnavi Sarma | Updated : March 13, 2020 10:48 AM IST
A rare and incurable neurodegenerative disorder can actually make you laugh till you die. @Shutterstock
The world is a strange place and there are many weird and, sometimes, downright bizarre medical conditions that you may come across when you least expect it. Some of these conditions are thankfully no longer around to affect us. But there are many such medical condition and diseases that refuse to go away and keep coming back at regular intervals. One such condition is the laughing death disorder. This condition is the direct result of the practice of cannibalism and it was rampant among an aboriginal tribe in Papua New Guinea.
You must have heard many people say, 'I will die laughing', in extremely funny situations. But did you know that some people literally do die laughing? Yes, it is true. You can actually die if you have the laughing death disorder. A rare and incurable neurodegenerative disorder can actually make you laugh till you die. Also known as Kuru, this condition was common among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. It causes uncontrollable tremors and a patient is prone to pathologic bursts of laughter.
This condition is basically a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). It is the result of abnormally folded proteins or prion proteins. Bacterial, viral or fungal infections cannot cause this disease. A person usually dies within a year of ingesting a contaminated brain.
Experts say that the practice of funerary cannibalism may be the cause. In this community, deceased family members were cooked and eaten to free the spirit of the dead. Usually, women and children ate the brain, where the infectious prions are located. The incubation period of this disease can be anywhere from 10 to 50 years. Therefore, though cannibalism among this community stopped in the early 1960s, the disease kept appearing till 2009. After that the cases stopped.
This is not a curable condition and a patient will most certainly die if he contracts this disease. But thankfully, now, there are no known cases for almost 10 years now. Hopefully, this disease may have disappeared from the face of the earth.
