14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays, cases of leprosy in Europe are extremely few and far in between. Scientists have long suspected that this is because the pathogen triggering this disease has somehow lost its virulence, meaning that it is no longer able to sicken as many people as it used to in the past.
A team of researchers writing in a recent issue of the journal Science disagree with this hypothesis, and say that Europeans no longer get leprosy because they have somehow grown immune to it.
These specialists base their claim on the discovery that the genetic make up of the leprosy pathogen presently affecting thousands of people in the Middle East and other parts of the world is not all that different from that of the leprosy pathogen that wreaked havoc in Europe nearly 500 years ago.
This suggests that the leprosy pathogen, i.e. Mycobacterium leprae, did not evolve all that much as the years went by, and that Europeans were the ones who “trained” their bodies to fight it back.
Daily Mail reports that, in order to obtain information on how the leprosy pathogen did or did not alter its make up in time, the researchers analyzed and compared several samples.
Some of the samples were taken from present day leprosy sufferers, while others were collected from people who died of this disease in the Middle Ages.
“The sudden decline of leprosy in 16th century Europe was almost certainly not due to the medieval European strain of M. leprae losing virulence,” the scientists write in their paper.
“If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us; so that's where we need to look,” Dr. Stewart Cole, the current director of the Global Health Institute in Switzerland, goes on to say.
Presently, leprosy infects 225,000 people living in 91 countries all across the world.
If the researchers are right and Europeans are in fact immune to it, their findings could help specialists develop treatment options.