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London (pte018/09.02.2005/10:30) - Human remains recently found in Israel that date from the 1st Century AD suggest that tuberculosis (TB) might have killed off leprosy in Europe. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, scientists at the University College London (UCL) http://www.ucl.ac.uk have been examining a shrouded body recently discovered in a cave near Jerusalem. The man's bones reveal he was infected with both TB and leprosy. According to the scientists, TB would have won the battle of the diseases as it is the more aggressive and fast-killing of the two. The research findings appear in the latest edition of the Royal Society Proceedings B.
Leprosy was commonplace in the Middle Ages. Around this time, TB began to spread across Europe and overtook leprosy, which has become a relatively rare disease now compared to TB. One theory today suggests that having one of these diseases protects a person against contracting the other one, something called "cross-immunity". Some scientists claim this theory explains the rise of TB and the fall of leprosy - more people caught TB and were thus protected against leprosy.
However, according to Helen Donoghue and Mark Spigelman from UCL's Centre for Infectious Diseases and International Health, their findings disprove this notion. "The fact that you can get active disease with both organisms - TB and leprosy - at once seems to contradict the cross immunity theory," explained Donoghue. "We believe if a person had both leprosy and TB they did not have time to die from the leprosy and died of TB instead. Eventually, that is why leprosy declined in Western Europe," she said. The remains examined by the researchers were discovered by Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson.
According to Spigelman, leprosy was a feared disease at the time and that people with leprosy were often cast out of society and shunned. These social factors, combined with the effect of the disease on the body, might weaken the person's immune system, he said. This, in turn, would make them susceptible to contracting TB or having a reactivation of past TB infection that was lying dormant in the body, he added. According to Dianna Lockwood, a leprologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the findings were interesting and that certainly a person with both TB and leprosy was more likely to die from the TB. However, according to Lockwood, the new theory does not explain why places like India and Ethiopia still have relatively high levels of both leprosy and TB.
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