Kuru Kuru (also known as laughing sickness due to the outbursts of laughter that mark its second phase) was first noted in New Guinea in the early 1900s. Kuru is now known to be a prion disease, one of several known transmissible spongiform encephalopathies . Copyright Notice Adapted from Wikipedia. Text is available under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 ; additional terms may apply.