Medieval skeleton gives clues to the spread of leprosy

Record ID: 275937

  • Title: Medieval skeleton gives clues to the spread of leprosy
  • Date: 20th February 2017
  • Summary: BALAKA, MALAWI (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF LEPROSY SUFFERERS
  • Embargoed: 6th March 2017 11:11
  • Keywords: leprosy University of Winchester St Mary Magdalen skeleton
  • Location: No-Data-Available
  • City: No-Data-Available
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Life Sciences,Science
  • Reuters ID: LVA00364BRTCR
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: The skeleton of a medieval leper excavated from one of Britain's earliest known hospitals is shedding light on the genetic origins of the disfiguring skin disease, according to researchers at the University of Winchester.
    The team investigated the strain found in a leprosy hospital cemetery at St. Mary Magdalen just outside the city, dating from the Eleventh Century, and say their findings are testing our knowledge of the disease and how it spread.
    "The DNA of leprosy has not really changed over the centuries so it suggest that we have changed in response to it," said osteo-archaelogist Katie Tucker, co-lead author of the research, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
    The team focused on the skeleton of a leper buried with a badge of a pilgrim, a scallop shell, which was subjected to genotyping, radiocarbon dating and biomolecular analysis.
    The shell badge shows he had completed the pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostella, the shrine of St James in Spain, which estimates say attracted up to two million people annually at the end of the 11th and beginning of the 12th centuries.
    "It strongly suggests that in this case pilgrimage may have been a conduit for leprosy. Certainly the individual had early stage leprosy, we don't know whether he died of leprosy but he certainly would have had it, it would have affected his feet, it would have affected his hands and clearly he would have had some skin condition as well related to it. And the second important part of this research is what is a pilgrim doing within a leprosy cemetery? Because if we believe our traditional historians we are told that leprosy sufferers were outcast, the hospitals loomed on the edges of cities. These individuals were treated very much as low status akin to criminals in the medieval period," said Dr. Simon Roffey, Reader in Archaeology at the University of Winchester and research project leader.
    The research team found 86 per cent of all remains they studied at the burial site showed skeletal lesions indicating leprosy, the largest percentage recorded in Britain.
    Although the research team identified the strain of leprosy the pilgrim contracted, it remains unclear whether he contracted leprosy before, during or after his pilgrimage.
    "There are still something like a quarter of a million new cases a year of leprosy so it's still a big problem elsewhere but in Europe we seem to have evolved to actually be resistant to contracting leprosy," Tucker said.
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