Leprosy, a chronic human disease with potentially debilitating neurological consequences, results from infection with Mycobacterium leprae. This unculturable pathogen has undergone extensive reductive evolution, with half of its genome now occupied by pseudogenes. Using comparative genomics, we demonstrated that all extant cases of leprosy are attributable to a single clone whose dissemination worldwide can be retraced from analysis of very rare single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The disease seems to have originated in Eastern Africa or the Near East and spread with successive human migrations. Europeans or North Africans introduced leprosy into West Africa and the Americas within the past 500 years.
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View Article and Find Full Text PDFTracing Leprosy: The paleopathological study of the individuals excavated from the Sant Llàtzer leprosarium in Barcelona, Spain (12th-18th c.).
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BioArCh Research Group, Department of Archaeology, University of York, York YO10 5NG, United Kingdom. Electronic address:
Objective: Our objectives are twofold: to analyse the frequency of leprosy-related pathological lesions in the cemetery of Sant Llàtzer Hospital (12th-18th c.); and to examine how individuals affected by the disease were perceived and integrated into society during that period in Barcelona.
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- Leprosy is an infectious disease primarily affecting the skin and nerves, but it can also impact internal organs and tissues, leading to deformities and disabilities in severe cases.
- A 39-year-old male patient presented with fever, headache, and rash, prompting histopathological examinations and analysis of skin lesions.
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Freudenthal Institute & Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences (UIPS), Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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