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As Buruli ulcer cases have risen, they have taken a physical and psychological toll but also offered hope that scientists can solve the bacteria’s many mysteries.
SORRENTO, Australia — To Rob Courtney, it looked like a sunburn. But after a few days, the redness and inflammation got worse. Soon, the skin on his right foot was split open, the wound oozing. His doctor sent him straight to the emergency room.
Then came the horrifying diagnosis: Mr. Courtney was infected with a species of flesh-eating bacteria.
In recent years, cases of the disease, known as Buruli ulcer, have exploded in the seaside area where Mr. Courtney, 80, lives in southeastern Australia.
As he would learn, it is a fearsome intruder.
The ulcer left the flesh on his foot corroded and gangrenous. It devoured a skin graft. Eventually, doctors prescribed the same powerful antibiotics used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis. The drugs made him feel nauseated and fatigued, and turned his sweat and tears orange. He spent nearly 50 days in the hospital.
“It’s been a bit of a journey,” Mr. Courtney said recently as he lay on an examination table at his local clinic, where he has endured a daily wound dressing for several weeks. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Buruli ulcer has been reported in 33 countries, primarily in Africa, where a lack of access to health care can mean that cases go on for months, sometimes resulting in disfigurement and disability.
In Australia, where cases of the ulcer have been recorded since the 1940s, the recent increase in infections has brought new attention to the neglected disease. That, along with a growing global interest in infectious diseases, has raised hopes that scientists might finally have the resources to crack its code.
The area hit hardest in Australia is the Mornington Peninsula, in the state of Victoria. More than 180 cases per year have been reported in the state since 2016, peaking in 2018 at 340. In February, the disease crept further into the suburbs of Melbourne, a city of five million people.
No one knows exactly how the infection spreads or why it has flared on the Mornington Peninsula, an affluent region less than 50 miles from Melbourne where cafes line leafy boulevards and thousands of tourists visit each year.
Scientists think that Buruli ulcer — and up to 75 percent of emerging diseases, including the coronavirus — is zoonotic, meaning it jumps from animals to humans. They say zoonotic disease are becoming more common in part because of human encroachment on wild environments.
As for the spike in cases in Victoria, the leading theory is that possums, a marsupial native to Australia, carry the bacteria, which are then transmitted to humans by mosquitoes that have come into contact with the animal’s feces.
The bacterium has long been present, but “what we’ve done is stumbled into it and maybe helped it to amplify and become the unwitting victims,” said Dr. Paul Johnson, a physician and professor of infectious diseases at Austin Health in Melbourne. “We’ve provided situations where it can expand rapidly and cause human disease.”
In recent years, as attention to the disease has increased funding for research, Dr. Johnson and others have been trying to figure out exactly how Buruli ulcer is transmitted. To test their theory, the scientists are working to reduce the number of mosquitoes on the Mornington Peninsula to see whether cases of Buruli ulcer drop as well.
On a Saturday in late February, Dr. Johnson and Tim Stinear, a professor of microbiology at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne, led a troop of more than a dozen researchers — clad in yellow “Beating Buruli in Victoria” vests — as they set mosquito traps in the suburbs of the Mornington Peninsula.
The researchers have also been on the hunt for possum feces, which they say has given them a crucial map of hot spots where the bacteria are present. “Once you start looking for this stuff, you see it everywhere,” Professor Stinear said as he knelt in a driveway, using a stick to scoop the scat into a sandwich bag. “Because it is everywhere.”
Despite possums’ ubiquitousness, they are protected as native creatures in Australia. That has tended to stall research and has stood in the way of culling programs that could reduce the spread of the disease. (Vaccinating the animals, though, is a possibility.) Efforts to cull mosquitoes with insecticide have also met pushback from environmentalists.
The opposition is hardly a surprise, researchers say, given the global wave of distrust in science. But funding work on obscure diseases like Buruli ulcer is crucial to halting future outbreaks. “We never know when they will become important,” Professor Stinear said. “This is a lesson that we learned with coronavirus.”
For those who contract Buruli ulcer, the journey can be arduous, leading to severe illness and sometimes even amputation and death in older and vulnerable patients. The wounds can take months to heal, scarring patients both physically and psychologically.
“It’s a huge illness to deal with,” said Dr. Daniel O’Brien, an infectious disease specialist based in Geelong, 50 miles southwest of Melbourne. “It becomes quite disconcerting for people in the community.”
On a Friday in March, Dr. O’Brien, masked and bespectacled, treated Mr. Courtney and more than a dozen other patients at a clinic in Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula. When Dr. O’Brien began traveling there about a decade ago, he would see a handful of patients each week. Now he sees up to 50.
He has treated more than a thousand patients, both in Australia and overseas, for the disease. Many of those in Australia are older, but others are young teachers, laborers and even children.
He measures their lesions gently with a ruler, marking them to track their progression. Though they look like the stuff of nightmares — some have ulcers that eat all the way to the bone — most patients describe them as painless. The flesh-eating toxin produced by the bacteria presents a peculiar horror: It both weakens the immune response and numbs the flesh it is consuming. It’s “quite an extraordinary organism, really,” Dr. O’Brien said of the bacterium, “and a formidable foe.”
In Mr. Courtney’s case, the ulcer had ravaged the top half of his foot before doctors could give a diagnosis. They have since performed surgeries to remove the necrotic, concrete-like tissue. “Unless you get rid of that dead flesh, the skin will never heal,” said Dr. Adrian Murrie, a physician at the clinic who has been treating Mr. Courtney.
Other patients with less severe cases sometimes decline treatment, instead opting for natural remedies like applying heat and clay. Though the body can occasionally fight off smaller ulcers, such treatments can pose a real danger in serious cases, Dr. O’Brien said.
In most cases, the course of treatment is antibiotics. Previously, the disease was largely treated with surgery, but with better medications, the prognosis has vastly improved in recent years. “It was thought the antibiotics didn’t work,” Dr. O’Brien said. “Because it actually gets worse before it gets better.”
Still, for now, prevention is close to impossible.
“We don’t know how to stop it,” he said. But if the answer is to be found anywhere, he said, it’s in Australia.
For Mr. Courtney, his battle with the disease is far from over. Doctors expect his treatment to last at least another six months.
“When you’re 80 years old, and you lose a year,” he said, “you get really savage about it.”