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. "A vivid and engrossing account of a scientific saga worthy of Paul de Kruff's Microbe-Hunters."– Beryl Lieff Benderly, San Jose Mercury News "Classic medical detective story."– George Johnson, The New York Times Book Review "An Upton Sinclair-ish look inside the modern meat industry...Rhodes tells this medical detective story beautifully."– John Schwartz, The Washington Post "[Rhodes] is a wonderful storyteller, Deadly Feasts is a great mystery story."– Nancy Schapiro, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Deadly Feasts is a breezy, immensely readable account....It is a splendid description of the process by which scientific knowledge is advanced."– Claudia Winkler, The Weekly Standard "In the science literature of Armageddon, Deadly Feasts is in a class by itself....Rhodes is able to make hard science come alive."– Peter Collier, Chicago Tribune "Deadly Feasts is a book to be read and pondered carefully -- and perhaps acted on -- possibly before eating one's next hamburger."– Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker 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 television’s 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 website RichardRhodes.com. 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 the Bounty after 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 barricaded behind impenetrable, leech-infested rain forests. Its people were Melanesian -- small, muscular, black, woolly-haired Stone Age fishermen, hunters and farmers -- divided into a thousand warring groups so isolated from each other by conflict and difficult terrain that they spoke more than seven hundred separate languages, one island's cacophony accounting for half the languages on earth. By the time Dutch, German and English ships began to anchor at the mouths of the island's great tidal rivers, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was common knowledge among Europeans that the savages of New Guinea were cannibals. But there are cannibals and cannibals: warriors who eat their enemies, hating them, but also relatives who eat their kin in a mortuary feast of love. Fore women ate their kin. "Their bellies are their cemeteries," one observer remarks. "I eat you" was a Fore greeting. Down in the garden in the flaring firelight, the dead woman's daughters ringed her wrists and ankles, sawed through the tough cartilage, disjointed the bones and passed the wrinkled dark hands and splayed feet to her brother's wife and the wife of her sister's son. Slitting the skin of the arms and legs, the daughters stripped out muscle, distributing it in dripping chunks to kin and friends among the eager crowd of women. They opened the