Sentences with word «leprosy»

Now, the first comprehensive genetic comparison of the bacterial strains that cause the disease is shedding light on where leprosy originated and how it has followed people seemingly everywhere they've gone.

In a study of 110 dead red squirrels, those in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Wight were found to be carrying a bacterial strain that is closely related to a virulent form of leprosy endemic in Mexico.

The discovery of this medieval leprosy strain so long after it was eliminated from humans was completely unexpected, says team member Stewart Cole, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Tuberculosis, leprosy, and Legionnaire's disease are infections caused by different species of bacteria.

Cole's team also conducted a study on over two hundred skin samples from leprosy patients in Asia, Africa, and the Americas to determine the geographic distribution of M. lepromatosis.

Because M. lepromatosis can not be grown in the lab and animal models for this version of leprosy do not exist yet, the scientists used an infected skin sample from a patient in Mexico to obtain the bacterium's genetic material.

Once they had the complete sequence of the bacterium's genome, they were able to compare it with the known genome of M. leprae, the bacterium responsible for the majority of leprosy cases.

Until recently, leprosy was attributed to a single bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae; we now suspect that its close relative, Mycobacterium lepromatosis, might cause a rare but severe form of leprosy.

Scientists at École Polytechnique Fe?de?rale de Lausanne (EPFL) have analyzed for the first time the complete genome of M. lepromatosis, and compared it to that of the major leprosy - causing bacterium.

The prime example is thalidomide, which was outlawed in the 1960s because it caused birth defects but has now found a niche in the treatment of cancer and leprosy.

In contrast, the major leprosy - causing bacterium M. leprae is widespread across the world.

Although we have been able to push back the disease with antibiotics, leprosy remains endemic in many developing countries today.

The find could help scientists develop less - toxic versions of the drug, which has helped combat the cancer multiple myeloma and complications of leprosy.

Armadillos, one of the only animals other than humans to carry leprosy, have been spreading the rare bacterial disease in the southern U.S. Stay away from that roadkill.

Menendez also asked for Price's views on whether immigrants have caused leprosy outbreaks in the United States, a scenario apparently promoted by some conservatives.

In the 1990s the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its use in the treatment of both multiple myeloma (a form of cancer that affects plasma cells) and the complications of leprosy.

In a related report former WHO Global Leprosy Program team leader Vijaykumar Pannikar wrote, «It can not be overemphasized that any potential benefit with thalidomide must be balanced with the known toxicity and the accompanying ethical and legal constraints on its use.»

But the Japanese Leprosy Association has always been made up largely of doctors who work in the sanatoriums where sufferers are incarcerated.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare wants to repeal the 1907 Leprosy Prevention Law, which classifies the disease as incurable and contagious.

SEVERAL decades later than other industrialised countries, Japan is about to abolish a law which keeps people with leprosy behind locked doors.

Even as far back as 1953, leprosy could be treated with drugs.

Ironically, it was the association that had kept alive the myth about the dangers of leprosy even after drugs became available to cure the disease, and doctors realised that it was barely contagious.

«Looking back on the 1953 Leprosy Prevention Law, I think we should have done a better job,» says Nakajima.

In 1953 the law was revised, easing restrictions on new leprosy sufferers.

The company in - licensed thalidomide in 1992 and received FDA approval to market the drug (as Thalomid) for treating severe cutaneous manifestations of leprosy in 1998 and for treating multiple myeloma in combination with dexamethasone in 2006.

The team's findings suggests that the Brownsea squirrels may have been affected by leprosy for centuries.

«Brownsea's wild red squirrel population has been living with leprosy for at least four decades,» says Angela Cott, National Trust general manager for Brownsea Island.

Red squirrels in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Wight were found to be carrying Mycobacterium lepromatosis, a bacterial strain that is closely related to a virulent form of human leprosy endemic in Mexico and the Caribbean.

In humans, leprosy causes nerve and muscle damage which can lead to deformity, disability and blindness if left untreated.

When you launched GHIT the focus was on poverty - exacerbating diseases prevalent in developing nations — HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and neglected tropical diseases such as leprosy and Chagas disease.

The discovery of this medieval leprosy strain in the Brownsea Island so long after it was eliminated from humans was completely unexpected, says team - member Stewart Cole, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Of the 25 dead squirrels the team tested, every one was infected with this leprosy strain.

Collectively known as neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, these illnesses include leprosy, rabies, blinding trachoma and lymphatic filariasis (also known as elephantiasis).

A study of 110 dead red squirrels from around the UK and Ireland has found that the animals carry several strains of leprosy.

A study of 110 squirrels found evidence of several strains of leprosy, including a type known to have infected people living in the same area 730 years ago

He knew that victims of leprosy, for instance, can lose the sense of touch in their limbs, so he developed a glove with transducers on each fingertip that were connected to five points on the forehead.

Introduction of the vaccine, which contains a killed mycobacterium — a distant relative of the leprosy organism — began early last month in the state of Gujarat in western India, and it will soon be deployed in Bihar state, in the east.

India is launching a new assault against an age - old scourge: leprosy.

Over the past millennium the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, which causes leprosy (Hansen's disease), has changed very slowly.

SERIOUS SIGNS Red squirrels across the British Isles have tested positive for the bacteria that cause leprosy.

Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

Until recently, leprosy, clinically known as Hansen's disease, was thought to be transmitted only between humans.

In this case, squirrels seem to be ideal incubators for leprosy bacteria.

Leprosy, for example, may have arrived from the Middle East with the Crusaders.

But many scientists fear that if the leprosy problem is seen as solved, funding bodies will lose interest and complacency will allow the disease to spread once again, as has been the case with TB.

The endangered bushy - tailed rodents (Sciurus vulgaris) have tested positive for leprosy - causing bacteria in several locations around the British Isles, researchers report November 11 in Science.

Leprosy has been hiding out in red squirrels in Great Britain and Ireland, though the painful and disfiguring disease has rarely been transmitted between humans there since the Middle Ages.

Several bacterial strains from East Asia belonged to the ancestral lineages of the leprosy bacilli.

The researchers also discovered that leprosy itself might have originated in the Far East.

Despite being curable with multidrug therapy, leprosy still persists in many developing countries, with more than 200,000 new cases every year and increasing drug - resistant strains of the leprosy bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, emerging.