Learning from leprosy’s nerve damage

Since ancient times, societies have feared and sometimes cast out people with leprosy, an infectious disease characterized by skin lesions and a gradual loss of feeling in the limbs. Researchers have now teased out some of the earliest steps in the irreversible nerve damage characteristic of the disease. It turns out that the bacterium that causes leprosy directly damages a protective sheathing, made of the protein myelin, around many nerve cells.