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Wild primates threaten efforts to wipe out skin disease

An attempt to eliminate disfiguring yaws disease fails to account for primate hosts.
  1. Lucas Laursen

    1. Lucas Laursen is a freelance science writer based in Madrid.

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Global health officials are intensifying efforts to eradicate yaws, a disfiguring skin disease that infects more than 64,000 people a year in 14 African and southeast Asian countries. But some critics say that the plans could fail, because they don’t take account of discoveries in the past few years that wild primate populations harbour the bacterial infection. That could complicate or foil eradication efforts, they say.

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Nature 554, 286 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-01703-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 09 February 2018: An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that the yaws bacterium had been found in macaques in East Asia. In fact the researchers had found antibodies against the bacterium in the macaques, but not that these had been caused by yaws infection.

References

  1. Knauf, S. et al. Vet. Pathol. 49, 292–303 (2011).

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  2. Knauf, S., Liu, H. & Harper K. N. Emerg. Infect. Dis. 19, 2058-2060 (2013).

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