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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
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In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but when he returned from 'cross the seas, did he bring with him a new disease?
New skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew not only introduced the Old World to the New World, but brought back syphilis as well, researchers say.
Syphilis is caused by Treponema pallidum bacteria, and is usually curable nowadays with antibiotics. Untreated, it can damage the heart, brain, eyes and bones; it can also be fatal.
The first known epidemic of syphilis occurred during the Renaissance in 1495. Initially its plague broke out among the army of Charles the VIII after the French king invaded Naples. It then proceeded to devastate Europe, said researcher George Armelagos, a skeletal biologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
"Syphilis has been around for 500 years," said researcher Molly Zuckerman at Mississippi State University. "People started debating where it came from shortly afterward, and they haven't stopped since. It was one of the first global diseases, and understanding where it came from and how it spread may help us combat diseases today."
Stigmatized disease
The fact that syphilis is a stigmatized sexually transmitted disease has added to the controversy over its origins. People often seem to want to blame some other country for it, said researcher Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory. [Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders]
Armelagos originally doubted the so-called Columbian theory for syphilis when he first heard about it decades ago. "I laughed at the idea that a small group of sailors brought back this disease that caused this major European epidemic," he recalled. Critics of the Columbian theory have proposed that syphilis had always bedeviled the Old World but simply had not been set apart from other rotting diseases such as leprosy until 1500 or so.
However, upon further investigation, Armelagos and his colleagues got a shock — all of the available evidence they found supported the Columbian theory, findings they published in 1988. "It was a paradigm shift," Armelagos says. Then in 2008, genetic analysis by Armelagos and his collaborators of syphilis's family of bacteria lent further support to the theory.
Still, there have been reports of 50 skeletons from Europe dating back from before Columbus set sail that apparently showed the lesions of chronic syphilis. These seemed to be evidence that syphilis originated in the Old World and that Columbus was not to blame.
Armelagos and his colleagues took a closer look at all the data from these prior reports. They found most of the skeletal material didn't actually meet at least one of the standard diagnostic criteria for chronic syphilis, such as pitting on the skull, known as caries sicca, and pitting and swelling of the long bones.
"There's no really good evidence of a syphilis case before 1492 in Europe," Armelagos told LiveScience.
In the seafood?
The 16 reports that did meet the criteria for syphilis came from coastal regions where seafood was a large part of the diet. This seafood contains "old carbon" from deep, upwelling ocean waters. As such, they might fall prey to the so-called "marine reservoir effect" that can throw off radiocarbon dating of a skeleton by hundreds or even thousands of years. To adjust for this effect, the researchers figured out the amount of seafood these individuals ate when alive. Since our bodies constantly break down and rebuild our bones, measurements of bone-collagen protein can provide a record of diet.
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8 Comments
Add CommentI believe that Columbia is the source of wormwood. Ironic , if true.Wormwood is predicted to kill a third.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are two interesting papers on the subject, one in Virchows Arch, 2011, by Ortner, DJ, and other by Rotschild, BM in Clin Infect Dis, 2005. However, chronicles from the spaniards that first arrived to the americas, told about one of the symptoms of the disease, they call "Bubas", and linked the disease to a local idol, the natives called "El bubosito". "The little bubous one". Unmarried sex, and even sometimes supposedly safe sex, has always involved some risks, both moral and medical, and the discovery of Penicillin just was a short lived break, some ethnic and social groups considering sex as a danger and a deadly activity in itself, a belief surely coming from the experiences of pre-antibiotic ages. I remember, during a 1986 visit to Paris, a man, obvioulsy suffering from Tabes, a late neurologic complication of syphillis, that while trying to pickpocket my wallet, offered me to introduce me to "some women". The history sounds a sad black joke, but it's real. Hope nobody accepted his offer. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is interesting and in hindsight, perhaps not that suprising. Europeans transfered many deadly diseases to the 'new world', seems reasonable that the new world would thank the old world in kind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuestion: so, do the 'new world' indigenous populations have some immunity to syphilis? (similar to malaria, some percentage (was it 1/3?) of the indigenous population in those areas can harbor the parasite yet not get ill from it.
Not being updated with parasitology, I would expect treponema species to be more abundant in geographic areas (humans are the most widely spread mammal, and quite anomalous in range compared to others. This leads to symbionts generally being localized outside of our own species) where the disease was first prevalent or actually arose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch evidence would add strongly to the Western Hemisphere origination hypothesis.
gmperkins:
a consideration in your question would have to be the evolutionary time available for our species (K-selected long-lived with low reproductive rate and slow maturation) to evolve resistance.
A factor increasing the time necessary to evolve resistance in our own species is the cultural evolutionary handing down of medication curing, arresting, or slowing of symptoms or disease.
There was only a probable maximum of 13,000 years, and in certain areas of the Americas less than 8,000 known years of habitation. During part of that time, populations might have been too small for either medical discovery or sufficient proliferation of the parasite to gather attention or momentum.
There are other cultural variances as well as geographical/cultural events or variables which would have significant effects on transmission in certain groups and areas, changing the demographics on these continents. (I give as support the severe, severe penalties imposed within numerous South Asian tribes upon premarital sex. Explore these and other such limiters)
Another psychological/cultural one is hinted at : You will remember that those who were not Italian called it the "Italian disease", not Spanish calling it the "Spanish disease", and so on.
Human propensity to avoid blame and assign it to others affects everything, including such occupations as scientific inquiry and more & less informed comment. It is up to individuals to assess these and other factors in seeking answers.
I enjoyed your comment, supposing it to be ironic. (It's getting hard to tell.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease try to use complete sentences. If you are referring to the Biblical account it is an angel named Wormwood that poisons a third of the water. It is not a plant. The Wormwood plant does not grow in Columbia, it grows in Eurasia and Africa.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again, pretty much your entire post was wrong and/or nonsense.
If you find advanced lifeforms so terrible then why not "simplify" yourself and prove that you really believe that. Hypocricy isn't a convincing arguement and while you are still alive you are clearly a hypocrite.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn Spain syphilis received the name "Morbo gallico", -the french disease-, in France it was atributed to spaniards. Currently, syphilis incidence has a cycle, in waves of high and low number of cases, such in a sinusoidal curve, and this may have no connection with changes in sexual behaviour or other people-related elements, it's just this way. Salut +
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