Writing in the journal Current Biology, Inskip and an international team of colleagues report how they studied strains of leprosy found in samples from three people who lived in Winchester between 900 and 600 years ago, and a squirrel whose bones were found in a furrier pit in the city dating to between 1,000 and 900 years ago.<\/p>\n
The team focused on Winchester because it was an important city in the medieval period and had a leper hospital and myriad skinners involved in the preparation and selling of fur-lined clothes \u2013 meaning it was possible to obtain squirrel and human remains from the time.<\/p>\n
The team extracted and analysed DNA from the samples, revealing a very similar strain of leprosy was present in all.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn fact, the strains that are in the archaeological squirrels and the archaeological humans from Winchester are more closely related than the strain that\u2019s in the medieval squirrels [and] the strain that is in modern squirrels,\u201d said Inskip.<\/p>\n
The team say the results suggest there was transmission of the disease between humans and squirrels.<\/p>\n However, the findings are based on just a handful of samples, and the results cannot shed light on whether humans initially caught leprosy from red squirrels or vice versa.<\/p>\n Inskip said that even in the latter case, the animals could pass the disease back to humans, noting that while humans first gave the disease to armadillos in the Americas, they can now catch it from the animals.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that it can ping-pong backwards and forwards,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Inskip added that there were a number of possibilities for how transmission may have occurred.<\/p>\n \u201cOne mechanism would be the fur trade,\u201d she said. Indeed the study reports that in 1384 alone, 377,200 squirrel skins were imported to England from Scandinavia and other places.<\/p>\n However squirrels were also widely kept as pets, offering another route of contact with humans.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth mechanisms are possible. And they\u2019re not mutually exclusive either,\u201d said Inskip.<\/p>\n Inskip said the study also had implications for people suffering from leprosy today.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe we need to go and look at the animals that are around these communities,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause perhaps it\u2019s possible that some of these animals maybe have the bacteria and that\u2019s maybe why the disease is hanging around.\u201d<\/p>\n