He used it a few years ago to reveal that a pre-Columbian site in central Mexico was far larger than explorers on the ground had detected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there may be more than one million cases a year, caused by different subspecies of the parasite.įisher is an expert in the imagery produced by lidar, a technology that deploys laser pulses to look through vegetation to the concealed ground beneath. Leishmaniasis is barely known in North America but very common in Central and South America and the Middle East. “I’m not Indiana Jones,” Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University and a National Geographic grantee, said ruefully. The team members have returned to their homes, and most of them have recovered-but the episode has been an unexpected reminder of the dangers that can dog even the best-prepared fieldwork. medical institutions that research the disease and regularly treat patients. The illness was transmitted by sand flies that swarmed the explorers in stinging clouds.Ībout half the people on the expedition, described in the October issue of National Geographic, have been diagnosed with the illness, which is caused by parasites that break down the skin and can cause weeping, potentially disfiguring sores.įive were so ill that they were sent for treatment at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, one of the few U.S. Members of a successful recent expedition to find a lost city in the Honduran rain forest have returned to the United States with an unwelcome souvenir: infections from the tropical disease leishmaniasis.

Parasite in the city all deaths