(Taiwan English News/Comprehensive foreign report by Zhu Mingzhu) The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that a 54-year-old man was diagnosed with “Leprosy”. There is no relevant contact history, and the CDC judged that the disease has been prevalent in the southeastern United States.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 200,000 new cases each year worldwide. According to the US CDC statistics, there were 216 Hannosis cases in the US in 2019, and 159 cases in 2020, of which 1% occurred in Florida. It is worth noting that Central Florida accounted for 81% of the state’s cases.
Han’s disease is a chronic, easily curable but not easily contagious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae. The causative agent is Mycobacterium leprae, which can be transmitted through the upper respiratory tract and damaged skin through long-term contact with patients leprae, or through animals as the intermediary host of Bacillus leprae, and then infect humans, mainly apes, red squirrels and armadillos, etc., but the real mode of infection is still unknown.
Han’s disease mainly invades the skin, mucous membranes and surrounding nerves of the human body, causing numbness in the affected area, loss of muscle control and disability.
Early symptoms are red or white patches, papules, or nodules on the skin with loss of sensation; however, very early skin sensation may be normal. Han disease is mainly treated with antibiotics. If the infection is treated early, it can be completely cured without sequelae. If the treatment is delayed, the patient’s body will be severely damaged, resulting in blindness, deafness, claw hands, collapsed nose bridge, eyebrow drop, lion face, fat ears, festered limbs, and defects at the end of the hands and feet.
Since the initial symptoms of Han’s disease are not obvious, and the course of the disease is extremely slow, the incubation period is as short as 2.5 months and as long as 40 years, usually 2 to 5 years. It is easy to be misdiagnosed in the early stage of infection, thus missing the golden treatment period.
Back to this case, according to CDC data, the case was a gardener who worked outdoors for a long time. After diagnosis, it was found that he had related symptoms as early as 5 years ago.
Experts remind that this is not the first time that Florida has become a hotbed for the resurgence of rare diseases. This summer, the state had its first malaria case since 2003. In 2015 and 2022, rare flesh-eating bacteria outbreaks also broke out.
Since from 2015 to 2020, about one-third of the confirmed cases reported in the United States were determined to be domestic infections, and most of the patients in Florida were not related to traditional risk factors, and the proportion of outdoor activities for a long time was extremely high, experts recommend , Local sewage or reservoirs can be sampled for investigation of the source of infection.
2023-08-03 09:50:44
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