Amazing what you can learn poking around the Internet

Rob Waters reports for Bloomber, Columbus Probably Brought Syphilis to Europe, Gene Study Finds 01/15/08:

It wasn't a coincidence that the first syphilis epidemic in Europe occurred soon after Columbus and his men returned from the New World, researchers said.

The first explorers of the Americas probably contracted a tropical disease caused by the same family of bacteria that causes syphilis and carried it back home, where it mutated into the sexually transmitted disease, said a group of scientists who studied its genetic history.

The "Columbus hypothesis" was previously thought to be true primarily because of the timing of the first outbreak, which devastated Europe in 1495. In the latest report, published in the journal Public Library of Science, or PLOS, researchers from Emory University in Atlanta compared the genomes of 26 forms of the bacteria that cause syphilis and other diseases. They found the strain that ravaged Europe was probably related to an older strain from South America.

"That supports the hypothesis that syphilis - or some progenitor - came from the New World," Kristin Harper, an evolutionary biologist at Emory, said in a statement.

I may be the last person in the world to have heard about this. But I don't recall even hearing that link made before. Certainly, the European explorers and conquerers brought some new diseases to the New World, as well. The downsides of globalization appeared pretty early, it seems.

Tags: columbus, syphilis