Explorers find a long-lost mythical city in the depths of the Honduran jungle — only to return home with its curse: Aided by advanced LIDAR technology and armed with a lot of gusto, a team of brazen explorers ventured into the belly of the Honduran Mosquitia Jungle — one of the earth’s last unexplored regions — to find what they believe is an ancient city that had long been dismissed as a legend. It took scientists more than 500 years of trial and error to penetrate these remote parts of the Honduran rainforest to locate the White City, or what they came to call the City of the Monkey God, only to find evidence that this once wealthy and majestic hub had been abandoned by its people after it was ravaged by disease, author Douglas Preston, who was a member of the expedition, writes in the New Yorker. But it wasn’t until they returned home that they knew for certain that they had been correct, when around half the expedition began falling ill to the curse of the lost city, a parasitic flesh-eating disease known as Leishmaniasis that they had contracted from sandfly bites, National Geographic says (we’ll avoid making your guts churn on this fine Friday morning with a description of the disease but you can tap here for more info).

Oddly enough, the flesh-eating disease is not native to the land, but one of many pathogens that 15th century European explorers brought to the South American shores when they set out to discover the New World, whose people had no immunity or any form of genetic resistance to these diseases. It was through trade at first, then conquest and enslavement that those new diseases began to travel from the shores and into the mainland, wiping out entire populations in their path. “Anthropologists have documented that between 1518-1550, almost 90% of the native people of Honduras died of disease,” Preston says. “Europe’s Black Death at its worst carried off 30-60% of the population.” Science was able to cure the modern-day explorers, albeit painfully, and most of them said they would definitely go back, including lead archaeologist Chris Fisher as well as Preston, who recently published his book about the journey. “No great discoveries are made without some risk,” Preston said.