Columbus did not take syphilis to the Americas – he brought it back to Europe
When a mysterious flesh-rotting disease broke out in Europe in 1495, two years after Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas, suspicion fell on his crew.
Syphilis was soon rampant across the Continent and beyond, but its origins continued to be fiercely debated, with some historians claiming it was actually home-grown.
Now, scientists have carried out genetic testing on the bones of infected people from Chile, Peru, Mexico and Argentina, who lived between the 13th and 15th centuries and died before Columbus arrived.
They found that ancestral forms of syphilis were present in the New World before it was discovered by Europeans, indicating that the bacterium did indeed hitch a lift back with the explorers.
Historical documents show that Columbus’ crew “carried off” native women, acquiring sexually transmitted diseases.
The French disease
Syphilis was first recorded in French soldiers fighting in Italy for Charles VIII. Dubbed “the great pox” or “the French disease”, it killed five million in Europe at the end of 15th century and beginning of the 16th.
The sexually transmitted infection starts with painless ulcers on the genitals, before bringing rashes, flu-like fatigue, headaches and eventually foul-smelling oozing pustules.
Joseph Grunpeck, a German physician who contracted the illness, described it as “so appalling, that until now, nothing more terrible or disgusting has ever been known on this earth”.
In 1519, Ulrich von Hutten, the German poet and scholar, said that “boils stood out like acorns” and issued “filthy, stinking matter”.
Syphilis can lie dormant for years, meaning that often people do not realise they are infected and pass it on to loved ones. In the final stages, the skin begins to rot and disintegrate and victims succumb to heart failure or brain damage.
The disease had largely been eradicated in the Western world by the mid-20th century, but has recently had a resurgence. In 2022, UK syphilis cases reached their highest level since 1948.
Many communicable diseases moved westward across the Atlantic during the early colonial period bringing devastating consequences for indigenous people.
Syphilis is one of a few that made the reverse journey
The disease leaves tell-tale lesion marks on bones and teeth.
Other diseases can leave similar marks, so researchers set out to study DNA from the pathogens which had been left in the bones of sufferers in the Americas.
“We’ve known for some time that syphilis-like infections occurred in the Americas for millennia, but from the lesions alone it’s impossible to fully characterize the disease,” said Dr Casey Kirkpatrick, a paleopathologist at the Max Planck Institute.
The team was able to recover and analyse five ancient genomes of the syphilis “disease family”, to determine the relationship between the extinct forms and the strains circulating today.
They found lineages which predate the strains in Europe and contributed to the explosion in cases of syphilis there in the 15th and 16th centuries.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/18/columbus-didnt-take-syphilis-to-the-americas/
The first suspected cases in Europe date to 1494, when French King Charles VIII invaded Italy at the head of an army of mercenaries from across the continent. Historical accounts report a new disease sweeping through the army’s crowded camps, disfiguring and debilitating thousands of soldiers.
When the war ended in 1495, the mercenaries headed home, bringing the sexually transmitted infection with them. By 1500, cases of syphilis—characterized by skin sores on the face and genitals that stigmatized the infected—were reported all across Europe. “The spread [was] quite rapid, and quite devastating,”
Syphilis is part of a small family of diseases that includes yaws and bejel. While syphilis is found around the world, yaws and bejel are tropical diseases seen mostly in equatorial regions. All three conditions are caused by strains of Treponema pallidum bacteria.
Columbus transported the disease to Europe aboard the Santa Maria and other ships
A 38-year-old man was found to have malignant syphilis which caused painful, crusted ulcers all over his body
The symptoms started as painless lumps over his torso, arms and face but developed into oozing ulcers
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