Leprosy in Britain? Blame Vikings and red squirrels

LEPROSY came to Britain as a result of the medieval trade in red squirrels, a study suggests.

Anglo-Saxons bought the rodents from Vikings for their fur and meat. As the squirrels harbour the leprosy bacterium, the disease was brought across the North Sea to East Anglia, archaeologists believe.

Although the last case in humans in Britain was more than 200 years ago, the disease was rife during late medieval times, when sufferers were treated as outcasts.

Genetic analysis of a woman’s skull unearthed in a garden in Hoxne, Suffolk, showed she carried Mycobacterium leprae.

The Hoxne woman is one of a growing number of cases identified in human remains from the early medieval and Norman periods found in or around East Anglia.

The strain has also been found in medieval Scandinavian skeletons – and is closely related to the strain found in red squirrels.

Sarah Inskip of Cambridge University, who led the research, said contact with the ‘highly-prized’ squirrel pelts and meat traded by Vikings could have spread the disease and would explain why leprosy was endemic in coastal areas of East Anglia earlier than it was in other regions of Britain.

Research has shown that the disease can be passed from animals to humans, she added. ‘It is questionable how long the bacteria could have survived on fur or meat, but it’s notable that squirrels were also sometimes kept as pets.’

Tests on the Hoxne woman showed she lived sometime between 885 and 1015, and probably ate a diet of wheat, barley and pottage with a small amount of animal protein, according to the research, published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Damage to her skull indicated she suffered from leprosy and would have had extensive facial lesions. The same strain of leprosy was found in the skeleton of a man from Great Chesterford, Essex, who lived around 400 years earlier.

A recent study found leprosy infection in red squirrels on Brownsea Island, Dorset.