A second chance

Abstract

In 1952, the World Health Organization started a massive international campaign to eradicate yaws, a tropical skin disease of the poor that occurred in almost 100 countries. Yaws is not deadly, but if untreated it can lead to severe bone and skin damage and cause permanent pain and disfigurement. The campaign slashed cases by 95% or more, but eventually fizzled out, in part because curing yaws required penicillin injections that weren't suitable to give to entire populations at risk. By the 1990s, yaws was forgotten but the bacterium that causes it, Treponema pallidum subspecies pertenue, wasn't eradicated, and it bounced back. But in 2012, a Spanish doctor and scientist named Oriol Mitjà, working on a very remote island in Papua New Guinea, showed that a single dose of a cheap antibiotic named azithromycin cures yaws as well. The discovery put yaws back on the international agenda, led to a wave of new research, and revived the dream of eradication.