In a national park in Guinea, researchers found that chimpanzees living in the area seemed to be infected with a strange disease, and the chimpanzees infected with the disease had a very ugly face full of pimples.
Meanwhile, in another national park more than 1,000 miles from the chimpanzee, an animal here also suffers from the same disease as the ugly chimpanzee.
According to the study, these animals were all infected with leprosy, a disease caused by leprosy bacteria that is contagious. In the past, leprosy has been widely prevalent in the human world, leprosy is not fatal, but it will cause the host to be disabled, but also lead to the host to become ugly, so in history, people call leprosy, syphilis and tuberculosis the world's three major chronic diseases.
But nowadays, human beings have been able to treat leprosy by means of drugs, and the cure rate of leprosy patients has also increased significantly, and in developed countries and many developing countries, there are fewer and fewer leprosy patients, and only in some poorer places, they are still suffering from leprosy.
Curiously, although chimpanzees are infected with leprosy, the areas in which they live are almost isolated from humans, and leprosy has not been found from researchers. More importantly, these two onset individuals are more than 1,000 miles apart, and they are geographically isolated from each other and have no direct communication, so why did they successively contract leprosy?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > chimpanzee leprosy</h1>
In fact, scientists have previously found individuals with leprosy from animals, such as the Nine-Banded Armadillo in the United States and the Red Squirrel in the United Kingdom. Although the two animals are different in species, they are both infected with a bacterial genotype known as 3I, which once caused leprosy in medieval Europeans.
It was only after scientists found that it was not these animals that transmitted leprosy to humans, but humans who transmitted leprosy to animals. That is to say, some of the leprosy bacteria can break through the separation of human and animal species and transfer the pathogens that originally infected humans to animals.
Is the chimpanzee leprosy found today infected by humans?
The researchers identified two bacterial genotypes from infected chimpanzees, which are very rare in humans. Moreover, researchers who regularly work with chimpanzees and local aides have not found cases of leprosy, so it is unlikely that the leprosy suffered by chimpanzees is transmitted from humans to wild chimpanzees.
Because leprosy spreads over long periods of close contact, researchers believe that there are unknown hosts of leprosy in nature that transmit leprosy to chimpanzees.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" Data-track="12" Why is it difficult to cure leprosy in chimpanzees >? </h1>
Although today's medicine can cure chimpanzee leprosy, it is very difficult to carry out medical rescue for them.
Leprosy is an infectious disease caused by bacteria, and the main way to treat leprosy is to take antibiotics, which can last for many months. During these months, it is very difficult to make sure that chimpanzees do not stop taking their medicine.
The first is because the leprosy are infected by wild chimpanzees, who have never been trained by humans and do not follow human instructions to take medicine.
Secondly, wild chimpanzees migrate every day, and it is very troublesome to track their migration routes and feed them on time and on time.
What's more, wild chimpanzees also have a certain aggressive power, which leads researchers to have to use anesthetics and provide them with a stable place to treat them. However, due to the treatment period of up to several months and chimpanzees are social animals, rushing to keep them in isolation for several months may make it difficult for them to re-integrate into the population and have a certain impact on their behavior, so chimpanzees' leprosy is relatively difficult to treat.
As it stands, infected chimpanzees are using their own immunity against the bacteria, and one of them has lost weight. According to the researchers, the disease has not put the entire population at risk for the time being, but if chimpanzees struggle to overcome the disease, it may become one of the threats to chimpanzees in the future.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="19" > summary</h1>
Finding bacteria that humans have been infected with in wild animals is not a good thing for humans, which means that the bacteria may mutate, enhance, and then spread to humans through various channels, triggering a new round of bacterial infections in humans.
Fortunately, we already have modern medicine as a means of confrontation and will no longer be as helpless as in the past.