Leprosy. We’ve all heard of it, but do you really know what causes it? What does the word make you think of? A disease that people got a long, long time ago? A super-contagious condition that causes ...

Evidence from archaeological sites in the medieval English city of Winchester shows that English red squirrels once served as an important host for Mycobacterium leprae strains that caused leprosy in ...

Lindsay Curtis is a health & medical writer in South Florida. She worked as a communications professional for health nonprofits and the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of ...

Leprosy has existed since at least Biblical times, yet scientists still don't know exactly how Mycobacterium leprae causes the disease's symptoms. Though antibiotics can treat the illness, researchers ...

For the past 25 years, Anura Rambukkana has been studying a disease that’s already been cured. He studies leprosy, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity before a course of drugs developed in ...

In order to understand the role of the upstream region of the Mycobacterium leprae 18-kDa gene on the gene regulation, the region was divided into two at the -50 position from the first start codon of ...

Well over a millennium ago—before European colonization—the bacterium Mycobacterium lepromatosis likely spanned the entire continent. That’s a notable new finding: before the bacterium was first ...

In northern Chile, two men were buried nearly 4,000 years ago. Now, their well-preserved bones have revealed something unexpected: the genetic traces of Mycobacterium lepromatosis, one of the bacteria ...

Anthropologists have recently reported on the analysis of a 4000-year-old skeleton from India bearing evidence of leprosy. This skeleton represents both the earliest archaeological evidence for human ...

Scientists have isolated leprosy bacteria directly from human samples, and analyzed the purified genomes to identify mutations that confer drug resistance to the bacterium, as well as gain insights ...