Initially, Preston and his team were all treated at the NIH lab, which Preston said he was "very impressed" by.
The treatment typically takes about three weeks, but some people continue to need treatment depending on the progression of the disease. These typically involve 6-8 hours of intravenous infusions daily, with highly toxic drugs designed to poison the parasite. Eventually it eats away at the bones of your face, and there's essentially a hole there, and you die."įormer British SAS commando Steve Sullivan (R) waits while the scientific team puzzles over a construction stone that they believe was carved by members of a vanished civilization.įortunately, there are treatments for the disease - if you can afford them. Then it starts to eat away at the rest of your skin until you have an open sore where your face used to be. "And if it gets to your face, it eats away at the skin and it gets your nose and your lips first, and they fall off. "It’s a flesh-eating parasite," explained Preston. One person's "interesting" may be another person's "terrifying" - if left untreated, leishmaniasis can have horrific consequences, and it has no cure. "If you're gonna get a disease and you're a journalist, this is one of the best ones to get. "We were very popular with the doctors," Preston said. There, two-thirds of his team members were diagnosed with leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating, parasitic disease spread by the bite of an infected sandfly. Some had trouble breathing others developed skin sores still others noticed it was harder than usual to swallow.Ĭoncerned they may have contracted something during their time in Central America, Preston and his colleagues were sent to a specialty laboratory led by the National Institutes of Health. "We found an untouched city." A flesh-eating parasiteīut in the weeks after they returned from the jungle, Preston and several other members of his team began to develop some worrying symptoms. "It was absolutely incredible the things we found," Preston told Business Insider. While there, Preston and the team uncovered more about the site, including a literal treasure trove of sacred objects that appeared to have been hurriedly gathered and hidden by the area's residents - before they hastily vanished. He details the full experience in the new book " The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story."Īll of this was part of an effort to learn about controversial 1,000-year-old ruins that appeared to be the remains of an ancient, legendary "lost city" that had been buried in the rain forest for 500 years. In that time, he and a team of researchers had wrestled a venomous snake, nearly drowned in quicksand, and been visited by hungry pumas on the prowl. Preston had spent the last week in a remote jungle in Honduras. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
0 kommentar(er)
