The germ, known to scientists as Mycobacterium ulcerans, has been identified across Africa's rainforests from Uganda to Ivory Coast since 1950, when an American went down with the disease in the then Belgian Congo. It has also been found in Ghana and Benin, but research is patchy and uncoordinated. It lives in hot and humid rainforest soil but thrives near dams, irrigation ditches and cleared forest. In some villages it has killed 13 percent of victims, doctors say. The total number of cases is unknown but European and African researchers want Buruli put on WHO's top category for tropical disease research funding, alongside malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever and other African scourges.
Ivory Coast is the world's main cocoa grower.
Buruli tends to attack women working fields around villages, along with their young children, who play in soil nearby. They often blame symptoms on sorcery, curses and black magic. Doctors believe people become infected when scratched by a sharp plant or through a scrape or cut on the skin. In 1995, there were 4,000 recorded cases. Some Pasteur Institute researchers put the number in 1997 at 6,000 or higher.