1. Epidemiologic and Genomic Reidentification of Yaws, Liberia
- Author
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Zeela Zaizay, Tarnue Mulbah, Romeo K. Giddings, Karsor Kollie, Nicholas R. Thomson, Michael Marks, Emerson Rogers, Stephen L. Walker, Katherine E. Halliday, Mathew A. Beale, Joseph Timothy, and Rachel L. Pullan
- Subjects
Microbiology (medical) ,bottleneck ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Epidemiology ,case detection ,030231 tropical medicine ,Population ,lcsh:Medicine ,nonhuman primate ,Subspecies ,lcsh:Infectious and parasitic diseases ,03 medical and health sciences ,Monophyly ,0302 clinical medicine ,case finding ,West Africa ,medicine ,Animals ,Humans ,lcsh:RC109-216 ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Treponema pallidum ,education ,Clade ,neglected tropical diseases ,bacteria ,pertenue ,genome ,education.field_of_study ,Treponema ,biology ,Research ,lcsh:R ,yaws ,sequencing ,Genomics ,biology.organism_classification ,Liberia ,accessibility ,Infectious Diseases ,Population bottleneck ,Cote d'Ivoire ,Epidemiologic and Genomic Reidentification of Yaws, Liberia ,Neglected tropical diseases ,Demography - Abstract
We confirmed endemicity and autochthonous transmission of yaws in Liberia after a population-based, community-led burden estimation (56,825 participants). Serologically confirmed yaws was rare and focal at population level (24 cases; 2.6 [95% CI 1.4-3.9] cases/10,000 population) with similar clinical epidemiology to other endemic countries in West Africa. Unsupervised classification of spatially referenced case finding data indicated that yaws was more likely to occur in hard-to-reach communities; healthcare-seeking was low among communities, and clinical awareness of yaws was low among healthcare workers. We recovered whole bacterial genomes from 12 cases and describe a monophyletic clade of Treponema pallidum subspecies pertenue, phylogenetically distinct from known TPE lineages, including those affecting neighboring nonhuman primate populations (Tai Forest, Cote d'Ivoire). Yaws is endemic in Liberia but exhibits low focal population prevalence with evidence of a historical genetic bottleneck and subsequent local expansion. Reporting gaps appear attributable to challenging epidemiology and low disease awareness.
- Published
- 2021