Scarring Bug Disease

The U.S. is seeing the spread of serious diseases — some disfiguring or even deadly — and many that we’ve never encountered before. Americans want answers.

The disease is caused by bites from sand flies and leads to severe facial scarring if left undiagnosed and untreated.

Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and measles are just a few of the diseases that are causing global concern right now.

And now, another new case in point: scarring bug disease.

“It’s a very bad situation,” Waleed Al-Salem, a doctor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said recently. “The disease has spread dramatically in Syria, but also into countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, and even into southern Europe with refugees coming in. There are thousands of cases in the region but it is still underestimated because no one can count the exact number of people affected,” he told The Daily Mail.

A collapse in Syria’s public health services has led to outbreaks of cutaneous leishmaniasis, or scarring bug disease. People fleeing that nation have now spread the parasitic disease to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, reports say.

In a recent letter to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several medical experts said the epidemic is a “neglected consequence of this tragedy.”

The disease is caused by bites from sand flies and can lead to severe facial scarring if it goes undiagnosed and untreated. There are two types: visceral leishmaniasis, which can produce a fatal illness that can resemble leukemia. The second form, cutaneous leishmaniasis — the type involved in the outbreak — produces skin ulcers. There is no vaccine or treatment to prevent this infection. Cutaneous leishmaniasis can heal on its own without treatment, but that can take months or years.

The infection cannot be transmitted between humans, so any refugees in the U.S. with it cannot give it to others.

Occasional cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis have been reported in Texas and Oklahoma, but there have not been cases of visceral leishmaniasis in the United States, the CDC says.

Until 1960, the prevalence of cutaneous leishmaniasis in Syria was restricted to Aleppo and Damascus. Before the civil war, there were about 23,000 cases a year; in 2013, there were about 41,000 cases. The regions most affected are under ISIS control, the authors — Al-Salem being one of them — wrote to the CDC.

About 4.2 million Syrians have been displaced into neighboring countries, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said. Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan have accepted most of these refugees, so cutaneous leishmaniasis has begun to emerge in those areas, they say.

The Lebanese Ministry of Health says six cases occurred between 2000 and 2012. In 2013, there were 1,033 cases and nearly 97 percent of them were among Syrian refugees.

[lz_ndn video=30866203]

U.S. Threat?
Dr. Singrid C. Roberts, a leishmania researcher from Pacific University in Oregon, told LifeZette the sand fly that transmits the disease to humans is typically not found in the U.S. She concurred with CDC data that says some cases have been found in Texas. The infection cannot be transmitted between humans, so any refugees in the U.S. with it cannot personally give it to others. It happens through a bite from the bug itself.

It’s not like Zika virus, which is transmitted through an insect found across the country, Roberts noted.

“There’s definitely a worry that it could be brought [farther north],” she said. “The bigger danger is that this will creep up from the South.”