The annual number of Victorians diagnosed with Buruli ulcers has almost tripled in the past three years and doctors believe it will continue to rise. The disease is colloquially known as the "Bairnsdale Ulcer" because of an outbreak in the Gippsland town several years ago, although now it is more commonly found on the Mornington Peninsula.  WARNING: Graphic images 
 
 When Ella Crofts began feeling a dull ache in her right knee, the last thing she imagined was that a flesh-eating ulcer was chewing through her skin. Ella Crofts, an active and healthy 13-year-old from Tyabb, was struck down with Mycobacterium Ulcerans in April and is still trying to recover from the disease that turned her knee into a festering sore the size of her palm. “A couple of days later it started to get the smallest of sores like a scab or a carpet burn and then a bit of redness around it.” 
 
 Ella’s parents took her to a local GP, who put her on antibiotics, but the wound continued to get worse. Photo: Supplied 
 
 Since then, she has endured three operations to clean out the dead tissue around her knee and though the wound is slowly healing she still walks with a limp. It’s unclear how quickly symptoms show up after a person is infected, but authorities estimate that it’s somewhere in the range of four weeks to nine months. The study of 579 patients found that they tend to cluster on arms and legs. The schoolgirl this week started an online petition calling for Health Minister Greg Hunt – who is also her local MP – to provide more funding for research into the disease and has already collected more than 6700 signatures. “Bottom line is we had 70 percent more cases last year than we have ever had and we are more than double this year already on last year,” he said. Over the years there have been small outbreaks in East Gippsland, Phillip Island, and a major outbreak on the Bellarine Peninsula starting in 1998. Dr O’Brien said it was still a puzzle as to why the disease was migrating around the state and not much was even known about how it was spread. The bacteria are known to lurk around Victoria, but experts don’t know where it lives or how it spreads. “I’m at the forefront as a clinician trying to treat patients and getting more and more overwhelmed but also distressed at the fact that we are doing nothing to try and prevent people getting it in the first place,” Dr. Daniel O’Brien, of Royal Melbourne and Geelong hospitals, told Nine News. “I think our government should be putting significant amounts of money into trying to stop it and that means research.” 
 
 This week, a 13-year-old girl from Tyabb, Victoria, started an online petition to urge Health Minister Greg Hunt to provide more research funding for the disease.
– One of the least reassuring sentences you'll read this week: A flesh-eating bacterial infection that leads to "gaping, palm-sized ulcers" is on the rise, and experts have no idea how it's being spread. One of the more reassuring: It's happening in Victoria, Australia, so if you don't live there, you can read on with slightly less horror. Ars Technica reports that health authorities do know the bacterium at play—Mycobacterium ulcerans—and have recorded its rise from 47 infections in Victoria state in 2014 to 159 so far this year, reports Australia's ABC News. The infections do occur elsewhere in the world—generally in developing nations like Uganda, Nigeria, and Liberia—but a microbiologist terms the situation in Victoria an "epidemic." The organism comes from the same family of bacteria as leprosy and tuberculosis, and the Age reports that some scientists think possums and mosquitoes may be vectors. But that's just a theory at this point, and no prevention strategies have been developed. Antibiotics can typically successfully treat the infection, which most commonly occurs on the arms or legs, but it's a gruesome-looking, gangrene-like experience (see photos here if you can stomach them). 9News shares the case of 13-year-old Ella Crofts, who developed the infection in one of her knees in April. At first it just felt sore; ultimately, much of the kneecap had turned into an open sore. She had to undergo three surgeries to excise dead skin, and she's still walking with a limp. "We call it the zombie leg," her mother says. (This hiker barely survived an infection from a flesh-eating bacteria.)