Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God | Hacker News Reader

Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God

vancouversun.com

66 pointsearthly10x15 comments

Now this is how you write a headline. A bit more on the disease here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151019-leishmania... I'm actually a bit surprised that they did not suspect leishmaniasis earlier; it's not an unusual affliction for Mesosamerican deep jungle regions.

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

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).

Leishmaniasis is the big disease soldiers are supposed to watch for when deploying to the Middle East. I can spot those little flies anywhere.

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.

There are sadly still a lot of things we treat roughly in the same way, from most unoperable cancers to even strong acne (isotretinoin may not be "poison" in the commonly understood way, but the underlying concept of how and why we take it is still pretty much the same).

When you see scifi movies and shows where any ailment can be cured with 5 minutes in a machine, it's still a far away dream from where we are now. In a way, it's also full of hope.

After taking a lot of medical courses just for fun, and a lot of neuroscience, I took a course "Introduction to Clinical Neurology" offered on Coursera that had some stringent exam conditions so that it would even count towards having taken an official course for practicing doctors as part of continuing education. I also took one on the same platform actually taught by African doctors about various parasites common in Africa, leishmaniasis was in it too. (Note: Can't link, after the reorg. of Coursera those free courses are not even available in archived form.)

So anyway, especially the neurology course was kind of depressing. Basically, apart from watching and treating a few symptoms, and maybe delaying symptoms (the main example being Parkinson's and brain implants), there is nothing that can be done.

Looking at the state of medicine I'm reminded of the movie "City of Ember" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970411/), where survivors of the nuclear apocalypse were placed in an underground city, and the movie starts a few hundred years later when their (1960s level) technology and especially their power plant starts falling apart after many, many repairs. The engineers there, with no access to make anything new, only the supply they were given at the beginning, are like doctors, and the machinery like human bodies. You start with what you are given and it all goes downhill from there, with more or less horrible kludges and hacks around arising problems along the way.

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.

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.

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

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"

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.

> 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?

You'd die of heatstroke tromping around the jungle in an environmental suit.

I assume the answer is: cost. It's very expensive to fully isolate yourself from your surrounding environment both for the sake of exploring but also for camping. I would imagine there's not a lot of funding for this sort of research, if only because it doesn't seem to have much intrinsic value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com