On December 23, 2003 authorities announced that the first case of Mad Cow Disease in the United States had been found in a dairy cow in Mabton, Washington. The admission, though downplayed, hides a frightening reality. For thirty years, a covert sampling operation has been conducted on North American cattle to reveal how far the deadly prions that are thought to cause Mad Cow Disease have spread thought the nation's livestock. These efforts may be too late: BRAIN TRUST warns of an impending public health catastrophe as the American food supply, and other countries to which they export, becomes progressively more contaminated. Although statistics argue that only one in a million people become affected with the human version of Mad Cow Disease, research on many postmortem brains of Alzheimer's patients provide questionable data: the classic ravaged pathology of human Mad Cow Disease. Currently, there are millions of people worldwide who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and the numbers are growing. How many of those are related to Mad Cow? Until now, this complex story has remained untold - no one has been able to connect the dots. With BRIAN TRUST, Colm Kelleher reveals the frightening health implications for the first time.

Colm A. Kelleher, Ph.D., is a biochemist with a fifteen-year research career in cell and molecular biology. Following his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Dublin, Trinity College in 1983, Kelleher worked at the Ontario Cancer Institute, the Terry Fox Cancer Research Laboratory, and the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine. For the past eight years he has worked as project manager and team leader at a private research institute, using forensic science methodology to unravel scientific anomalies. www.simonsays.com.

Chapter 2: Kuru A young woman sat in the corner of the mud hut. Though she was bone thin, it was the look on her face that startled her visitor. The woman's face was expressionless. Her eyes were blank. The lack of expression was so profound, in fact, that she could have been wearing a flesh-colored mask. Every few minutes, a fluttering tremor ran through her body, as if she was shivering uncontrollably from a cold wind. Vincent Zigas observed the woman as he sweated inside the hot, humid hut. Zigas had never seen symptoms like these before. He learned that the woman had kuru. She had been bewitched, he was told. There were many women and children in the village who had been bewitched by powerful sorcerers and they would all die, or so the story went. Nobody recovered from kuru. Zigas was a young German-Lithuanian doctor from Australia. He had arrived in the central New Guinea Highlands in 1955 on an Australian government assignment to help eradicate some of the diseases that thrived in the hot, clammy climate. Papua New Guinea presented a daunting topography for outsiders. Within an area slightly larger than California, the country combines dense, almost impenetrable, leech-infested rain forests and highlands stretching up to more than 13,000 feet. Half the island had belonged to Australia since 1910, and after the Japanese takeover during World War II, the Australian government sent several officials into the Highlands in a bid to tame the rampant lawlessness and often gory tribal conflicts among its warlike inhabitants who still used bows, arrows, and stone axes, and knew nothing of the existence of the wheel. But the term "Stone Age" fails to capture the real flavor of the place. Since Captain Cook's forays into the region in the late 1700s, New Guinea had a reputation for being home to multiple tribes of bloodthirsty cannibals and headhunters. After his arrival in Kainantu and a nearby village called Okapa, Zigas discovered he was the only medically trained doctor in that part of New Guinea. In 1955, Kainantu, known as the "gateway to the Highlands," was a small settlement several days' hike from the Highlands, where the medical supplies from the Australian Department of Health arrived. The town was a central crossing point for people moving up and down from the Highlands and was a natural place for Zigas to set up his base. While in Kainantu he heard rumors about a mysterious disease called kuru in an obscure tribe called the Fore (pronounced FOR-ay). The Fore lived in the remote highlands and had had very little contact with the outside world.In September 1955, accompanied by a guide, Zigas set off to investigate these increasingly persistent rumors. After two days' hiking in the high terrain the guide led him into a small hamlet with a few scattered mud huts where Zigas witnessed the woman with the strange symptoms. By the end of the year, he had seen dozens of similar cases, mostly in women and children. He first thought it was a brain disorder, maybe a virus or bacterial infection. With almost no medical facilities and no clean water or electricity in the bush, Zigas took what medical supplies he could carry on the two- or three-day hike into the Highlands. As the numbers of kuru cases multiplied, he was quickly overwhelmed. Kuru was ripping apart the fabric of the Fore tribe, because every death from kuru demanded a death in revenge of the presumed sorcerer who had cursed the victim. The ritual murder, called tukabu, usually followed the kuru death by a few days. The deaths from kuru were predominantly women and children, but the deaths from tukabu were often men. Usually the tukabu involved the unfortunate person who was accused of sorcery, often with no evidence, being bludgeoned with rocks or hacked to death with machetes. A fiendish balance in mortality seemed to be playing out between the deaths of women and children by kuru and the deaths