Buruli, a virulent African version of a flesh-eating bacterium that surfaced in Western hospitals in the 1990s, strips away skin by destroying blood vessels with toxins to expose huge areas of gangrenous flesh. The disease, a cousin of tuberculosis and leprosy, was named after Uganda's Buruli region in 1960 by British researchers. The only way to treat it is to excise the rotting parts surgically.
Victims often die from multiple infections, exhaustion and blood poisoning.
Normally, it does not attack man. Now it is in an epidemic phase. In four years, the number of affected people doubled. The disease first surfaced in humans in 1948 in Australia, where koala bears have also been reported infected. 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.