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I told a story over on the news side of National Geographic, about an intrepid team of explorers who plunged into nearly impenetrable Honduran rainforest in order to ground truth the legend that it concealed a fabled “white city.” They succeeded (and you can read that story in the October issue of the magazine) — but the coda to their tale is that they sacrificed some of their health to do so. Nearly half the team returned home having contracted leishmaniasis, a parasitic tropical disease that causes weeping, disfiguring sores and can be fatal.
As I discovered reporting the story, leishmaniasis is what’s called a “neglected tropical disease,” a loose grouping of illnesses that affect more than 1 billion people worldwide, kill more than half a million people each year — and are almost ignored by drug companies because those victims and the countries they live in are too poor to be a lucrative market for cures. The explorers seeking the lost city discovered this when they grew sick enough to ask the National Institutes of Health for help, and found that the treatments available to them were prolonged, toxic, and didn’t promise a cure.
But here’s the thing: The 20-odd people who were sickened on the Honduran expedition aren’t as rare as we might think. The disease that has afflicted them, which was once limited to the South and Central America, and the Middle East, is gaining a foothold in the United States. Their experience, and their difficulty finding affordable, effective, safe treatment, should serve as warnings that we ought to heed while we can.
Read full, original post: The Little-Known, Disfiguring Disease That’s Coming Our Way
