This article is part of HuffPosts Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to fight them.

UTUT FOREST, Kenya This forest is full of leopards is not what you want to hear when youre trekking through the equatorial bush and armed only with two cheap umbrellas.

Especially when leopards are hardly the only threat.

Our party two journalists, two health workers and a handful of local guides is on an expedition into this forest in Kenyas Rift Valley to meet people plagued by bloodsucking sandflies that transmit a flesh-eating disease called cutaneous leishmaniasis .

This wilderness is largely uninhabited, but some 300 people live in caves here, and survive by selling charcoal. Its over an hour on foot to the nearest village, and the few roads or footpaths are impassable even by motorbike.