Global health officials are intensifying efforts to eradicate yaws, a disfiguring skin disease that infects more than 64,000 people a year in 14 African and southeast Asian countries. But some critics say that the plans could fail, because they don’t take account of discoveries in the past few years that wild primate populations harbour the bacterial infection. That could complicate or foil eradication efforts, they say.

Public-health officials met in Geneva, Switzerland, on 29–30 January to discuss how to expand the eradication programme in 6 of the 14 countries in which yaws is endemic. But they did not discuss the part played by wild animals. “Even if this is not the main cause of re-emerging yaws nowadays, it would jeopardize global eradication,” says Sascha Knauf, who studies neglected tropical diseases at the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany.
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