Leprosy has long been a mystery for scientists, and in 2020 came another puzzler about this ancient scourge of human civilization: wild chimpanzees in West Africa were found to suffer from it. ScienceMagArchives
Conservation scientist Kimberley Hockings was worried. In 2017, photos from camera traps in Guinea-Bissau's Cantanhez National Park, where she works, revealed several chimpanzees with terrible lesions on their faces. Hockings emailed wildlife veterinarian Fabian Leendertz."I have NEVER seen this in chimps," Leendertz, who works at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, wrote back.
Leprosy is an ancient ailment, but surprisingly little is known about where and when it emerged, or how exactly it spreads. The disease—and the—once afflicted millions of people across the globe. But after a combination of antibiotics became standard therapy in the 1980s, cases plummeted and scientific interest waned. The difficulty of studying leprosy adds to the lack of interest, says co-author Charlotte Avanzi, a microbiologist at Colorado State University , Fort Collins.
But the story in wild chimpanzees is shaping up to be very different. When a chimpanzee named Woodstock at Taï National Park in Ivory Coast started to show signs of leprosy, Leendertz decided to screen older fecal and necropsy samples from his library for the disease. He found traces ofin another chimpanzee that had been killed by a leopard in 2009. When researchers sequenced the pathogen's genome, they found it was of a rare genotype called 2F.
"The data increasingly points to the possibility that something else than humans is actually the main host," Stone says. That could be an animal the chimpanzees hunt, for instance, or the leprosy bacterium might even live in the environment.
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