"How a history of eating human brains protected this tribe from brain disease."

A grisly but jaunty headline for a WaPo article that begins:

The sickness spread at funerals.

The Fore people, a once-isolated tribe in eastern Papua New Guinea, had a long standing tradition of mortuary feasts — eating the the dead from their own community at funerals. Men consumed the flesh of their deceased relatives, while women and children ate the brain. It was an expression of respect for the lost loved ones, but the practice wreaked havoc on the communities they left behind. That’s because a deadly molecule that lives in brains was spreading to the women who ate them, causing a horrible degenerative illness called “kuru” that at one point killed 2 percent of the population each year.

So brain-eating caused disease and the people who didn't die it but lived to propagate their genes passed on resistance. That's the kind of PR deadly diseases are always flogging.

If you get past the titillating native-rituals material, there's more to the story:
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