
Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God - earthly10x
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/world/explorers+find+disease+cursed+city+monkey+nearly+lose+their+faces/12690846/story.html
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marchenko
Now this is how you write a headline. A bit more on the disease here:
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151019-leishmania...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151019-leishmaniasis-
lost-city-Honduras-Mosquitia-parasitic-disease/) I'm actually a bit surprised
that they did not suspect leishmaniasis earlier; it's not an unusual
affliction for Mesosamerican deep jungle regions.

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sebcat
I read:

"Preston told CBS News that months after leaving the jungle, he noticed a bug
bite that simply wouldn’t go away. And so did half his team members.
Eventually, the National Institutes of Health diagnosed them with
Leishmaniasis — a rare parasitic disease — and the team was forced to undergo
treatment"

So I looked at wikipedia, and the article [1] there says:

"About 12 million people are currently infected in some 98 countries. About 2
million new cases and between 20 and 50 thousand deaths occur each year. About
200 million people in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and southern
Europe live in areas where the disease is common."

Not unusual indeed.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leishmaniasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leishmaniasis)

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paulddraper
To quote your link

> Leishmaniasis is mostly a disease of the developing world, and is _rarely
> known_ in the developed world outside a small number of cases

So, not rare for where they visited, but rare for where they live (and where
the diagnosis happened).

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yomly
An aside, but reading the accounts of the medical treatment the explorers had
to endure after is a reminder of how ineffective modern medicine is, or at
least how much further we have yet to go:

They literally were taking poison and hoping that they would outlive the
parasite under those conditions. In the case where a parasite might be hiding
anywhere in your body this is probably still the only thing you can really
hope to do, but it feels like trying to burn down your house to get rid of a
rat infestation.

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projektfu
The more something is like ourselves, the harder it is to attack it with
chemicals. Our cells are very similar in nature to a lot of protozoan
parasites, so the drugs that may treat them are pretty toxic to ourselves.
Bacteria and fungi are much less like our cells, and they have a lot of unique
features such as peptidoglycan or ergosterol in the cell wall, therefore they
can be attacked with chemicals that are less toxic. Animals, such as insects
and nematodes, that have diverged significantly away from our common origin,
have evolved new features that we do not share, and we can attack those. Some
organisms of interest to (veterinary) medicine, such as _Leishmania_ and
_Pythium_ , are very difficult to treat.

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valarauca1
This is also why Cancer is very difficult to treat. Because it is your cells.

Chemo is poison that effects cancer cells slightly more severely then healthy
cells.

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camperman
In case anyone wondered (because the article only mentions it obliquely) the
city is in Honduras.

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johnhenry
It's worth noting that the full headline reads: "Explorers find disease-cursed
City of the Monkey God and nearly lose their faces to flesh-eating parasite"

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omgam
As a layman, I'm not clear on why we don't treat such sites like alien worlds
and come prepared with environmental suits for the jungle, special habitats
and vehicles, etc.

The article says the explorers don't believe it's practical to make the
journey - but aren't they operating from a paradigm which is on a continuum
from weekend camping trips? It seems past time to treat Earth's inhospitable
zones with an eye towards the difficulties and solutions of space exploration.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> As a layman, I'm not clear on why we don't treat such sites like alien
> worlds and come prepared with environmental suits for the jungle, special
> habitats and vehicles, etc.

"Budget."

(or, at least, this is what I imagine the answer is.)

> It seems past time to treat Earth's inhospitable zones with an eye towards
> the difficulties and solutions of space exploration.

Apollo had some major issues with moon dust and such - maintaining a sterile
environment is a different, if overlapping skillset with maintaining an
environment within a vacuum.

That said, there's all the NBC preparedness of the military, and e.g. the
medical response to outbreaks and quarantines - even if "don't enter the
quarantined area" is rule 1.

But hey, maybe Robots could be an option at some point. Still - do you fund
the expedition that requires expensive, custom, bespoke explorer-bots (because
there hasn't been much of a market for those for mass production to drive down
costs or standardize things) or do you fund the expedition where you can send
a few students for school credit?

