U.S. anthropologists have discovered the 200-year-old skull of a man who had leprosy on Petit-Mustique Island.
The study, published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, notes that the skull belonged to a woman who was between 20 and 25 years old. She had leprosy in her lifetime and died in the eighteenth to nineteenth century.
This find is the oldest found in the Americas. In all likelihood, a leprosarium formerly operated on a Caribbean island where leprosy patients were kept.
It is noted that the disease was one of the most common in the Caribbean islands. This infectious disease is caused by Mycobacterium leprae. There are now only a few people in the world with leprae.