Red squirrels are carrying human leprosy and people have been warned to stay away from the animals to minimise the risk of catching the disease.
One of the strains – which is affecting squirrels on Brownsea Island, off the south coast of Dorset – shares close similarities with that responsible for outbreaks of the disease in medieval Europe.
Researchers tested 25 samples from red squirrels on the island and found that all were infected with the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae, though not all showed signs of the disease. Those that did had swelling and hair loss on the ears, muzzle and feet.
Easily treatable, but one thing I have noticed – there seems to be a greater force which drives Apocalypse. Invariably, economic upheavals seem to accompany climate cooling, which seems to accompany disease outbreaks, which may accompany geologic activity, which may accompany solar activity, which itself has been speculated as having some tie to the greater positioning of the solar system within the galaxy.
I have wondered if this association may hold in the animal world as well. Might the unseen forces of early resource restriction that hit humans, perhaps due to nearly undetectable diminutions in food yield, at the same time hit the animal world, which begins to find itself weakened, and its populations dying back slightly due to a slightly smaller carrying capacity of its environment. Clearly the animals will begin seeing resource-related mortality long before humans, where such is nearly unheard of in the first world. That mortality, and the associated nutritionally deficient weakness which will accompany it in many survivors, is where disease gets its foothold.
If so, it would not take much dying back of a population due to starvation to produce a great little incubator for diseases which could then jump to humans. The black plague was due to rodents dying and their fleas seeking new hosts, for example. The dying may have exacerbated the amount of plague infected rats by weakening the overall immunity of the population, even before the flea vector began spreading the disease.
Food for thought. If an economic downturn comes, it will probably be triggered by a force which will also be creating a reservoir of potential zoonotic diseases outside the human populations, waiting to jump in. Being able to isolate your family for a period could be very important, if the pandemic hits.