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.

Richard Rhodes is the author of numerous books and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Appearing as host and correspondent for documentaries on public televisions Frontline and American Experience series, he has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Visit his websiteRichardRhodes.com.

CONTENTS

To the Reader

PART ONE: Among the Cannibals

1. I Eat You

2. Kuru

3. Dr. Creutzfeldt and Dr. Jakob

4. Across the Species Barrier

5. The Life and Death of Georgette

6. The Cannibal Connection

PART TWO: The Strangest Thing in All Biology

7. The Disease That Wouldn't Die

8. High-Tech Neocannibalism

9. Infecting the Children

10. A Candidate for a Modern Wonder

PART THREE: God in the Guise of a Virus

11. Meat Bites Back

12. Ice-Nine

13. It's Kuru and Nothing but Kuru

Afterword: We May Have to Face an Epidemic

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Index